Anna Fox: Resort 2, adult weekends at Butlin's Bognor Regis

Resort 2: the adult-only weekends at Butlin's

For two years the British photographer Anna Fox documented holiday culture at the Butlin's resort in Bognor Regis, West Sussex. Resort 2 is the second part of the project. Resort 1, published in October 2013, looked at the family breaks that made the camp's name and read as a study of contemporary British leisure; Resort 2 turns to a different kind of holiday altogether — the themed adult weekends that ran roughly every six weeks inside the same site.

The shift is commercial history as much as social observation. Butlin's had attracted tens of millions of holidaymakers since 1936, but from the 1970s onwards cheap package holidays abroad drew families away from the British seaside and several camps closed. The rebranded family break came first, and then a new invention: the adult-only themed weekend. Titles such as Back to the 60s, 90s Re-loaded and Hot Summer Party brought thousands of work-worn adults in for two days and three nights of fancy dress and organised carnival — imitation pop icons from Amy Winehouse to Elvis, and gangs of male fairies among them.

Fox shot the series on both medium and large format. The deeply saturated colour is doing structural work rather than decorative work: it holds a subject that could easily tip into ridicule at the level of description instead. Resort 2 collects forty photographs from the series with an essay by David Chandler.

A career in the British documentary tradition

Born in 1961, Fox completed a degree in audio-visual studies at the Surrey Institute in Farnham in 1986 and had been working in photography and video for over twenty years by the time of Resort 2. Her influences sit across two traditions — the British documentary lineage and the American New Colourists — and the combination was visible from the first major work.

That work was Workstations, published by and first exhibited at Camerawork in London in 1988, a critical observation of London office culture in the middle of the Thatcher years. Later work documenting weekend war games, Friendly Fire, was shown in the exhibition Warworks at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Netherlands Foto Institute and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Exhibitions, monographs and teaching

Fox has had solo shows at the Photographers' Gallery in London and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and her work has been included in international group exhibitions including Through the Looking Glass, Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-garde, and How We Are: Photographing Britain.

Several monographs have been published, among them Anna Fox Photographs 1983–2007, edited by Val Williams and published by Photoworks in 2007. The exhibition Cockroach Diary and Other Stories, curated by Anne McNeill, toured with Impressions Gallery. Alongside her practice she is Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham, which places her in the unusual position of having taught a generation of the photographers who appear elsewhere in this archive.

Set beside Workstations, the Resort books make a single long argument. Both look at organised British environments — the open-plan office in the mid-1980s, the holiday camp thirty years later — and both find the same thing: a place designed to produce a specific kind of behaviour, and people producing something more complicated inside it.

The two-year duration at Bognor Regis is worth reading as method rather than patience. A photographer who visits a themed weekend once comes away with costume pictures; the fancy dress is so loud that it swallows everything else in the frame. Returning across two years — through repeated cycles of the same 60s, 90s and party weekends — is what lets the work see past the costume to the behaviour: the same rituals performed by different crowds, the effort in the leisure, the moments between the organised carnival. It also changes the relationship with the site itself, since a resort that has seen the photographer before stops performing for her. The saturated large-format colour then fixes all of this with a formality the subject would never claim for itself, and the tension between the two is where the series lives.