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Masculinities In Conversation: Karen Knorr and Anna Fox

A black and white photograph of a well dressed, wealthy man looking despondent
12 May 2020
86 min listen

Join photographers Karen Knorr and Anna Fox in conversation, as they discuss the aesthetics and socio-political issues explored in their photography.

Photographers Anna Fox and Karen Knorr sit in conversation with Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. The discussion explores the aesthetic questions and socio-political issues broached by two important series of work presented in Masculinities: Knorr’s Gentlemen (1981–83) and Fox’s My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (2000).

Through the medium of film and photography, Masculinities: Liberation through Photography considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.

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Woman looking at a wall filled with photographs

Masculinities: In Conversation - Karen Knorr and Anna Fox

Join photographers Karen Knorr and Anna Fox in conversation with Sabina Jaskot-Gill, as they discuss the aesthetics and socio-political issues explored in their photography, as seen in our Masculinities exhibition.

Anna Fox's 'My Mother's Cupboards & My Father's Words'

'My Mother's Cupboards & My Father's Words' is a miniature book, publised by Here Press. You have to get close to be able to read the text and to register the details in the photographs. It was created in 2000, for the Shoreditch Biennale, at a time when Anna Fox was inspired to make work ‘close to home’, challenging the notion of the documentary photographer as outsider.

The book pairs words by her father – gruesome outbursts by a man with a rapidly debilitating disease towards the women in the house – with claustrophobic images of her mother’s neatly organised cupboards. The result is one of Fox’s most powerful and intimate bodies of work.

Purchase a copy of the book from the Here Press website. 

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