Anna Fox, Martin Parr

Anna Fox is a photographer who like myself grew up in the South of England and documents the everyday. Her The Village (1993), made in collaboration with curator Val Williams, is a key body of work for my project looking at domestic life in a rural West Sussex village. This work delves deeply into 'country life, setting the idea of rural change, and another side of contemporary Britain, against an imposing history of deep-seated community values and structures'. Her intention, written in Val Williams book, 'was to re-examine and expose the popular myth of the village as a rural idyll and to question the conversation values that had formed the moral backbone of her own childhood'.

When I mentioned to Matt my ideas about the FMP in my assessment he mentioned the idea of "end of line towns" and Weymouth came into my mind. I visit often to see my dad and thought at it could be an interesting topic of a project. It is an end of line town which became popular with tourists after King George III's, brother the Duke of Gloucester built a grand residence there, Gloucester Lodge, and passed the mild winter there in 1780. The King then made Weymouth his summer holiday residence on fourteen occasions between 1789 and 1805.

I visited my dad in Weymouth during the week off and spoke about Weymouth as a strange town which is still struggling to come back from the recession, how shops open and close within months and the locals and friends he had in the area. As a previously mentioned in my post about Alec Soth I wanted to look at what 'Britishness' and looking at Weymouth to try and describe this could be an interesting angle. It also helps that a have a connection to it via my father and know the area (visiting the local pubs mainly)

Martin Parr's work 'Think of England' documents the people he encountered in the summer of 1999, including the people of Weymouth, and asks indirectly what it takes and what its like to be English.

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