41 Hewitt Road 1996 – 1999, Photographs by Anna Fox

Spotted on ebay:

41 Hewitt Road 1996 – 1999, Anna Fox

Photographs by Anna Fox. Introduction by Val Williams. Unpaginated, 96 pp. with four-color plates throughout. 10 x 7-7/8 inches.

From 1996 to 1999 Anna Fox, her family and a number of lodgers lived in 41 Hewitt Road. The house was like any other house in the ladder streets above Finsbury Park, cracked paint crumbling walls and riddled with cockroaches. Anna photographed here constantly and this series of photographs edited from a much larger collection, shows the house, as if abandoned, no people just evidence of their presence. Photographs of corners, cupboards, mantel pieces, bathrooms, piles of possessions, souvenirs, cryptic notes and phone numbers scratched onto the walls, the strange hieroglyphics of children allowed to write on walls. A Madonna and a shabby relic from Butlins holiday camp. The only signs of life are the worms brought in by the cat. The photographs appear as if made by an archaeologist discovering a site of interest, recently deserted, but the emails between Fox and her former lodgers interspersed throughout the publication tell a different story.

Anna Fox is one of the most significant photographers to emerge from the new wave of British colour documentary of the 1980s, and in 2008 Impressions initiated a major survey show of Fox's work, Cockroach Diary and other stories. The exhibition was subsequently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography PrizE 2010.

(Looks interesting, but I will take issue with Anna; her house may have been a dump, and the Ladder may have been a bit tattier twenty years ago, but it wash;t all cracked walls and cockroaches by any stretch of the imagination).

If anyone buys the book, I'd love to have a look. Buy it on ebay at hgyol.in/1m5nqRy.