Country Girls, Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp

For Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp, growing up in and around the town of Alton in the 1970s, a lingering chill hung over Flood Meadows, a bucolic corner of rural Hampshire. The legacy of the gruesome 1867 murder and dismemberment of eight-year-old Fanny Adams, whose body parts were gradually found scattered across the meadows, lingered on – over one hundred years later – in a current threat of violence, in the adolescent fights and misogyny all around them.

Anna and Alison met in and around Alton in the early 1980s, hanging out at Chawton House, where Anna was living. At that time, the vast Elizabethan mansion – creaking with Jane Austen associations – had become a kind of paying commune with no defined private spaces, the site of creative activity and dialogue for younger people in the area. It was here in the early 1980s that Anna, then at art school, first photographed Alison in some light-hearted poses.

While never intended as a literal reference, looking back Anna and Alison were clearly affected by the menacing echo of Fanny Adams in their clinical, sometimes dehumanised close- cropped vignettes of isolated legs, hair and other ambiguous bodily features, without face or other obvious signs of pulsing life.