14 May

Written By Lorna Allan

Lorna Allan’s ‘In Frame’ series presents;

Somewhere Between Memory & Image

Interview with Alice & Florence Sanders-White

Lorna: I’ve got so many photos of you both, gives me plenty to play with…. So… hello.

Alice & Flo: (laughs) Kind of never know how to start these things.

Lorna: Yeah, same. So I’ll just ask: What’s your earliest memory of a photograph? Is it taking one, holding one or being in it?

Alice & Flo: Oh, I love that question. It’s something we’ve actually talked about before because it’s physically impossible to separate memory from a photograph. Like, you can’t tell what’s memory and what’s a photo. Especially as filmmakers, everything is an image. The way we think is through images, movement, vision. I remember reading somewhere that after you’ve seen a photo of an event, like being on the beach as a kid, what you “remember” isn’t the beach it’s the photo you’ve seen, so the memory is replaced by the image.

It’s like you’re watching a little movie of your life. You can even “remember” how you looked, which is impossible without the photo, then once you’ve seen it, the memory changes.

Lorna: Yeah, Susan Sontag talks about that in her book On Photography. You don’t really have the memory, it’s the memory of the photograph that immortalises it.

Alice & Flo: Exactly. And for a filmmaker, it’s kind of amazing, it's like your brain becomes a shot list. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, even talks about how the word for a person in a photograph is close to the word for ghost. That idea that a photo can keep someone alive and at an age you’ve never known them at that, but once you’ve seen the photo, it’s imprinted in your mind. It can be good and bad because once you’ve seen an image you didn’t want to, it never leaves.

“Animation is meditative: tiny movements, hours of work, and then it comes alive. It’s like doing a séance.” A&F

Lorna: Do you have one specific photo-memory though?

Alice & Flo: Honestly, my memory’s terrible before a certain point. I think of standing on the beach with my parents, but then realise; oh, that’s a photo on the fridge. Running along the beach? Same, also a fridge photo. So I don’t know if any of those memories aren’t actually fridge photos!

Lorna: Okay so fridge photos! (laughs)

Alice & Flo: Yeah, all the same ones, all on the fridge.

Lorna: Do you have a screensaver, or a picture you keep on your wall or phone?

Alice & Flo: My desktop’s been the same Jenny Holzer piece for years. From Inflammatory Essays, the pink one that says: Don’t talk down to me. Don’t be polite to me. Don’t try to make me feel nice… It’s all text on pink paper, but it’s artwork, image, text, poem, all in one. I love it, I have it above my bed.

The other one is a photo I took in Gettysburg. It’s the battlefield from a hill, the sun is shining, it's beautiful but it’s also one of the most haunted places in America. That contrast; beauty yet full of deathly happenings, I love it.

Lorna: Can you introduce what your art practice is?

Alice & Flo: We’re filmmakers. Animators. Which is funny because there are two of us, but it’s very solitary work. That’s probably the point we love the purity of DIY. The moment you involve actors or money, it dilutes the spirit of the thing. Animation is meditative: tiny movements, hours of work, and then it comes alive. It's like doing a séance by putting your hands on the table and hoping something moves.

Lorna: Ha, that’s such a good analogy. So we met when I was working on another project and wanted to shoot you both for that but then I got to know about your practice and then was keen to document your working process on the animation.

Alice & Flo: Yes! You ran up to us in the street asking to take a photo. I even went home to put makeup on, which was unnecessary because your photos make us look great anyway. I still use that picture. And then you helped us with our completely bodged-together multiplane rig to use for filming; total MacGyver energy.

“It’s physically impossible to separate memory from a photograph, you can’t tell what’s memory and what’s the photo” A&F

“The images are uncanny, unsettling… like Bigfoot, some forest creature caught on camera” A&F

Lorna: I loved capturing you guys working; painting the cells, drawing, the paper cutting so much detail! It was fascinating watching you work.

Alice & Flo: Did it feel like you were entering some weird private world?

Lorna: (laughs) Ha, no not weird, it was cool to observe it all develop and see you both working together. Photography gives me that license to enter these kind of spaces that could be quite private but are open to creative observations!

Alice & Flo: Yeah, it felt like you were just the third one of us. You joined the psychic link. (laughs)

Lorna: Well, I enjoyed it so much. For me, it’s about spending time, building trust, that’s how I hope to get good portraits. It’s not very commercially viable, but I do love that process. Which brings me to the portraiture shoot we did in the forest.

Alice & Flo: That was amazing. Weird, surreal, muddy. Wrong shoes but right shoes. The images are uncanny, unsettling. My favourite is the blurry one where I look over my shoulder, it looks like I’m seeing something that isn’t there.

Lorna: Yes! I love that framing, like a shot-reverse-shot stuck together.

Alice & Flo: Exactly. And the blurry running one, it’s like Bigfoot, some forest creature caught on camera. People we’ve shown it to are genuinely unnerved, which we love.

Lorna: Same; people love those uncanny ones.

Alice & Flo: And the misty, desolate vibe of that day has actually influenced our next project. It bridged perfectly into it.

Flo positioning the cell in the light box

“our completely bodged-together multiplane rig to use for filming; total MacGyver energy” A&F

Lorna: That’s so exciting. And how do you feel about the performative side of being photographed?

Alice & Flo: I try not to think about being watched. Otherwise it would be crippling. But at the same time, I know the photo becomes how I’ll see myself, so I want to get it right. Sometimes I just go blank, sometimes I make a gesture, like in the pulled back image we took in the forest, I did that Nosferatu hand movement. It felt right!

Lorna: It was brilliant, that little detail made that picture for me

Alice & Flo: I think of myself as a figure to be posed, like directing an animated character. Not me, but an image that needs to communicate. That’s why collaboration with you worked so well as you understood that too.

Lorna: Yes it was a very collaborative approach

Alice & Flo: You even captured our creepiness better than we ever have. Well done!

Lorna: (laughs) Thanks! Then finally I guess I wanted to ask about how you feel about collaboration.

Alice & Flo: For us we have been collaborating since the womb, literally. We don’t know how not to. Even with you, it felt seamless, you just slotted in.

For us collaboration is like breathing. Sometimes it’s fresh air, sometimes you don’t even notice it’s happening, but you can’t live without it, it’s constant, natural, symbiotic.

“For us collaboration is like breathing. Sometimes it’s fresh air, sometimes you don’t even notice it, but you can’t live without it.” A&F

Alice & Florence website

Lorna Allan