The Hyman Collection includes the four large-scale exhibition prints of Country Girls, as presented, dry-mounted to aluminium, in Anna Fox's major retrospective, Cockroach Diaries and Other Stories, Impressions Gallery, Bradford and tour (2008-09).
Country Girls (1996-2001) is a collaboration between Anna Fox and singer/songwriter Alison Goldfrapp. It explores the lives of women growing up in rural southern England and the story of Sweet Fanny Adams, which fascinated them both as young girls. The photographs, often disturbingly violent, act as metaphors for the feeling of suffocation they both felt as young women growing up in the countryside in the 1970s.
The photographs in this series have a disturbing sexual tension that recalls two post surrealist antecedents: the viewpoints suggest the voyeurism of Marcel Duchamp's great late installation Étant donnés, and the focus on the high heels, strong colour and flash light recall the production values of the fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, and especially his walking legs series, shot using a manequein and high heeled shoes designed by Charles Jourdan, which was photographed across England on a road trip in 1979.
Anna Fox explains: "We went out into the landscape, often at night or early morning, and made photographs that summed up our memories."
