Photographer Rachel Fleminger Hudson’s elaborately staged work garners attention for her perceived nostalgic ode to the 1970s, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Having grown up in a home filled with lovingly collected objects from her family’s past—from art to clothing to miscellaneous heirlooms—every object is packed with meaning, and emblematic of a time, a place or an experience, and now her work is packed with these talismanic items. She tells Gem Fletcher how she uses materials to connect with bygone eras, and to better understand today’s permanently online world.
Photographer Rachel Fleminger Hudson’s work is not “photography driven;” that is what she tells me from her studio in Tottenham when I ask her about the mythology around her practice. “That is one of the ways the work is misunderstood.” Mythology might sound grandiose when talking about an artist who only graduated from Central Saint Martins two years ago, but Hudson’s work has been widely celebrated for its nostalgic reimagining of the 1970s, despite the depth of her artistic intentions being misunderstood.
“I’m not a fashion photographer, but fashion is what the work is about,” says Hudson. “My work isn’t a glorification of the 1970s. For me, the 70s is a rule book. It’s about using meaning rather than dissolving it. It’s about making something flat to build ideas upon. In truth, I could be using any era.”
To understand the roots of Hudson’s work, which is more akin to image architecture, blending visual anthropology, sociology and phenomenology, creative direction and a profound obsession with costume, objects and materials, we must go back in time. Hudson grew up in a family that treasured the cultural inheritance of objects, collecting books, fliers, art and family heirlooms. Rather than entirely exist in the present, she was entrenched in the material past. She wasn’t watching TV like her peers; instead she was spending hours listening to comedies made between the 40s and 70s. This tension, born from existing between worlds, is the beating heart of Hudson’s practice.
While her multifaceted practice defies labels, “materials translator” might be the best way to describe her unique ability to create relational networks of objects. For Hudson, objects are talismans for people and experiences, holding pertinent histories and memories born at the intersection of theory, aesthetics and emotions. Her studio is littered with this historical treasure, from a 70s French plastic ice box shaped like an orange and a tiny metallic red and blue toy gun to a worn copy of Ken Russell’s script for the musical comedy “The Boyfriend.” Many of these materials never end up in her work, but being in their presence is a vital part of Hudson’s process, offering her a transcendent experience to connect with different strands of history.
Hudson’s interests lie less with nostalgia but hauntology, the persistent presence of elements from the social or cultural past who exist as ghosts in the present. In “La Ronde,” she depicts four interlinking couples examining the latent tensions and contractions of the 1970s through the lens of dress. The film, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s play of the same name, contains a rich array of visual codes, but its hero is an original yellow t-shirt by Mr Freedom, the renowned clothing boutique situated on London’s Kings Road in the early seventies. Worn by her protagonist Julia, an avid Bay City Rollers Fan, the shirt, loaded with cultural significance, is elevated to a character in its own right.
“I think about the work as anti-nostalgic,” explains Hudson. “Nostalgia, for me, is about being homesick for a distant past. I’m not homesick for the past because I exist in the material world of the 70s now through my relationship with objects. Being a young artist, there can be a pressure to simplify your work to make it more palatable for certain audiences,” Hudson tells me when I ask her about navigating personal responsibility. “I’m very respectful of the materials from the 70s that I’m working with, so when they start to become reduced to what they look like, or their meaning is taken out of context, it can be challenging.”
Over the last few years, we’ve seen Gen Z collectively revel in nostalgia, revisiting the safety of the past to escape the fragility of their present. While on the surface it’s easy to see how Hudson’s work has become emblematic of her generation, her idiosyncratic practice is more interested in confronting the present through our material past.
“Football Hooligans,” informed by the work of Iain S.P. Reid—a photographer who documented the crowds at Manchester derby games between 1976 and 77—is part of Hudson’s ongoing research on 70s youth culture. The photographic series is a staged fiction, reflecting the shifting nature of subculture and identity. Before the internet, belonging to a subculture was a commitment to uniting a community through visual codes and values. In contrast, the performance of self has now been fractured by the internet, enabling younger generations to experiment with multiple identities at any time.
The fallout is an individuated identity divorced from the camaraderie that made the pre-internet subcultures so resonant, something Hudson yearns for as she articulates the isolation of the Gen Z experience. “I’m trying to experience socializing through this work,” she says. “It’s a craving for intimacy and physicality that I feel was missing in the lives of my peers and me as we grew up online, where our social life existed through the image spectacle rather than being together. How we experience culture online is incredibly postmodern; our bodies are offline, but our brains are online. The consequence is that images are now more real than the people in front of us. Grappling with these complexities is what the work is about—it’s a way for me to understand the world better.”