On a particularly gloomy day in New York last February, when the sky was about as grey as Gordon Brown’s nipple hair, I wandered into this gem of a bookshop in Brooklyn to find Anne Hall and Sophie Morner’s The Known World, a photobook collecting together the beautiful images from their experience together in the forest.
I came across Anne Hall again recently on a collaboration we’re doing for a clothing company and asked her some questions about her photography and her ‘world’. Her last body of work, Tranimal, took her to rural Pennsylvania where she photographed and camped with a group of people who all identify (species, gender, etc) as real and mythical animals.
She currently lives Brooklyn with her girlfriend and her two pitbulls and is working on a ‘gingerbread crackhouse’ for the ‘Society for the Advancement of Inflammatory Consciousness’ group show opening on 10th December. Aaanyway. Anne Hall is a pretty interesting person.
What is the concept behind The Known World?
The Known World is a series that I worked on in 2005 and 2006. After working on several earlier series involving horse girls, and then magical landscapes, it was an attempt to take the work a step further, to try to inhabit that world that I had been, up to that point, describing from a distance.
I fell in love with a horse girl. The images describe our time together, both lived and longed for. It is creepy looking back at the pictures. It was such an intense time. There are so many clues in the images too. Often, I see clearer and further in images than I do consciously. I guess that is where the pictures operate from — deep desire and subconsciousness. There is a lot revealed, foreshadowed, requested, communicated through the images. In some ways, I think we were communicating with each other through the images. Sometimes I was speaking from my perspective in the images on something that was happening at that moment, other times I was asking questions with the work, “is this kind of love/life possible?”
Sophie, the girl I fell in love with and started the work about, is also a photographer. We photographed each other. She put together a book of our images, correspondences, artifacts, books we read together, and published it and I made a corresponding installation that was about that time. The show/book release was at her space in Brooklyn a year or so ago. After this the work felt finally closed, done, for both of us, I think. It was a crazy risk to take — to offer this desperate story. ”Though not intended as a political piece” as Jessica Gysel (Editor of GLU Magazine) said, “The Known World is a potentially seminal work in the realm of contemporary lesbian and feminist art and documentation.”
What purpose does photography serve for you? Have you found any changes to the way you live since you started taking photographs?
I have been working with photography for most of my life. I first picked up a camera when I was 15 and now I am 35. My relationship to photography is always changing. The most drastic change may have come in the last couple of years. I have been working around a lot of artists from LA. They have really challenged my fetishistic relationship to beautiful photographs and singular relationship to photography. In the past three years I have been working as much in sculpture, installation, and on collaborative projects as on my solo photographic investigations.
Do you see photography as a documentation of reality or of your interpretation of it?
There is no such thing as documentation or reality.
As in, you don’t think they truly exist or they don’t associate with photography?
The word documentary suggests objectivity of observation and originality of subject, neither of which, especially when speaking about photography, seem possible. That said, I do use the word anyway, when going to the video store but not when trying to talk about what anything really is.
I also don’t think there is any universal reality. I’m not sure what that word means anymore.
What prompted you to say fuck it to city life and go live in the wilderness for a while?
I chose the forest for so many reasons. It is a timeless place. It is a place of danger, fantasy. Maybe I kidnap people and drag them there and have my way with them. Problem is, they don’t/can’t/won’t stay put. If the Known is lifestyle photography, the style is feral.
So where is ‘The Known World’? Or is it a secret..
Everywhere, anywhere.
