Angela Hill Excavates a Disappeared Decade

Thirty years after street-casting teenager Elizabeth White for the cover of VERY magazine, Angela Hill reconstructs her flood-damaged negatives to publish the third in her girlhood trilogy

Two Christmases ago, photographer and IDEA co-founder Angela Hill was visiting her mother, who mentioned offhandedly that there was a box of her old magazines in the garage, which had flooded and was being cleared out, in case she wanted to look before it went in the skip. Under the waterlogged magazines were envelopes of negatives. “They were soaking wet, and all the chemicals were running all over my hand,” Hill recalls. She took what she could to a lab – “I don’t know what magic they do,” she laughs, “they really did a great job” – and many of the salvaged frames are now in Elizabeth: the third and final book in Hill’s trilogy for IDEA, after Sylvia and Edith.

It would be easy to fetishise what was in the box and is now in the book: film negatives, the late Nineties, a teenager in an oversized college sweatshirt, water damage as a stamp of artistic authenticity. But Hill’s photographs of streetcast school girl Elizabeth White, taken over five or six years from 1997, some for VERY, the magazine she co-founded, and many just for herself, are simply life.

The photographs sit within the matter-of-fact daylight of English weather, neither bleak nor bright: navy, school-shirt lilac, the pale green of playing fields. And in this natural flatness, they reach for no past or future but hold a single now, a single time-being: a girl on a given afternoon, on a sofa, at the airport, on the streets of London, wholly there, with no foresight of narrative, or of where life might twist and turn. A split second feels suspended, precisely and delicately, within each frame – Elizabeth, dozens of her, each as present as the last despite the passing of time.

None of this, however, is casual; Hill is always exacting as to where she places her attention. In her foreword for Elizabeth, Marfa Journal’s Alexandra Gordienko remembers days of discussion about “the exact shape of a collar, the colour of a sock or a coffee cup”. “I have to have everything just right,” Hill says of her process, “then I can take the photograph.” But what she won’t do is tell the moment what to be: she arranges everything, stages nothing – she doesn’t use lights, for example, and never works in a studio – and then, on film, she can’t see what she has. “You don‘t really know what you’re shooting,” she says, “you have a feeling at the time.”

The book’s cover is a scan of the cover of VERY, barcode and all, featuring Elizabeth, who was at boarding school in Somerset at the time. Hill took the train down, two and a half hours each way, to a bus stop they had agreed on in advance. Elizabeth arrived with her grandfather’s old Stanford University sweatshirt thrown over her school shirt so that no one from the local village would catch her sneaking out. “Five hours of travelling for 15 minutes of shooting,” Hill explains laughingly, “but I got the front cover.”

The photographer first spotted Elizabeth by chance on Portobello Road, where she was living at the time. ”I just bumped into her,” she says, “and it turned out she also lived nearby.” There was no project then: Hill cast her for VERY, met her parents, shot in the family home, and went on photographing her whenever her school schedule allowed. ”She was very free in herself,” she remembers of the model. ”She just walked along. She was always smoking.” And so Elizabeth appears: pulling a jumper over her head in a kitchen, beside a bus in a white shirt and a loosened tie, sitting in a room which, on the facing page, is empty.

“They became like my children,” Hill says of the girls she photographed then; a few years on, shooting Sylvia (the subject of the first book) on a beach for Purple, she had her newborn daughter with her, carried in a sling by an assistant. In a wonderful overlap of memories and nows, this daughter, Edith – the subject of the second book in the trilogy – has written a short text for Elizabeth: “My mum photographed my sister and me almost as often as she made us fish fingers, chips and peas.”

Alongside scans of magazine tear sheets, reprinted text and all, some of the negatives are printed with the flood still on them – a tide line across Elizabeth’s face, a portrait mottled from edge to edge. “Some of them are completely destroyed,” Hill says of the images that never made it. “So I can’t remember what I lost.” Nor does she pretend to: the images are not arranged to force meaning or to fill in the gaps; they are presented just as they were made.

Reflecting on that period of her life, Hill says she hasn’t kept in touch with Elizabeth and doesn’t know what she makes of the book. “I have no idea,” she says. “All she was interested in, all she could talk about, were horses. I bet she’s on some farm somewhere. I’d like to know.”

Elizabeth by Angela Hill is published by IDEA and is out now