Anne Hardy takes photographs but she doesn’t call herself ‘a photographer’. ‘I prefer artist,’ she says, perfectly reasonably. ‘I think ‘artist’ is more encompassing of what I do.’

What she does is create whole worlds, spaces or sets that she painstakingly builds over months and months, adding to and amending until they are ready to be captured by her camera for eternity. Looking at her photographs, you might at first think that Hardy is recording a room she stumbled upon, documenting an eccentric’s bizarre interior design decisions, but actually her work depicts invented spaces, imagined constructs, sets that have been built by Hardy purely so that she can take a single photograph of them.  

‘I build a structure in my studio,’ she explains, ‘I build in front of the camera, looking through the viewfinder. I don’t know what a piece will look like when I start out. I don’t work with a plan, it’s more to do with certain feelings and the materials, seeing where things go. The decisions about where things go in the space are partly to do with how an image works, but they are also a lot to do with the stories I’m imagining, where things might have been put intentionally and where things have ended up.’

When she is finished building the space – ‘I know when it is finished. It just is. It has its own presence’ – she takes a photograph (using film rather than digital). The space and all the pieces within it (I call them props but Hardy says she prefers ‘stuff-ness’), meanwhile, is destroyed, its purpose served. ‘After the photograph is complete and I am really, really sure, it’s dismantled, some items will be recycled, some discarded,’ she says cheerfully. The space no longer exists but it lives forever in the photograph, allowing its audience to create a story for it, to imagine the world it belongs to.

Hardy has had a camera since she got a Box Brownie as a ten-year-old and studied photography at the Royal College of Art, but why is she so drawn to depicting an invented world rather than the real one, I wonder. ‘The reason that I first started building things for the camera rather than going out and taking pictures of things was because I like the idea of fiction and the idea of creating these spaces, these parallel worlds,’ she says. ‘It’s about setting up suggestions.’

She has recently begun to create installation pieces and doesn’t rule out a foray into film, but this notion of a creating an invented space or parallel world is at the heart of everything she does. Sitting in her Bethnal Green studio, Hardy, who was born to scientist parents in Hertfordshire in 1970, discusses the literature she finds engaging, Ballard’s Concrete Island and Murakami's IQ84, both of which depict a new and imagined world, and shows me snapshots of the type of architecture (repurposed spaces or haphazard extensions) she finds interesting. She describes her morning routine of tending to her small garden at the Dalston home she shares with her photographer husband. She recalls the long walks she takes in London, the way she notices the home improvements people make in the suburbs. She talks and her strange and unusual work makes complete sense.        

 

 

Anne Hardy will have a solo show at  Kunstverein Freiburg from September 19-November 9, 2014, with the private view taking place on September 18.