Transcript: Alice
Maude-Roxby and Tansy Spinks in conversation, South London, 01.11.21
AMR: “Arcadia” is both the name of Vanda’s boat and the name
of a short-lived band incorporating members of Duran Duran, formed in 1980s. In
response to the request to compile a playlist for Vanda, I remembered the
conversation we’d had during lockdown whilst walking in Brockwell Park. As we
walked you described taking photographs for album covers throughout the 1980s.
When I looked up the covers of Arcadia’s So Red the Rose singles, I saw
that one of the images is credited to you. Can you tell me about the staircase
photograph that appears on Arcadia’s Goodbye is Forever?
TS: It is interesting isn’t it, that during lockdown we had these various discussions about where images come from and what we’d done. I confessed to you that I’d recently been scammed- someone had professed an interest in buying my work and I’d fallen for it of course. Over some months we had had a conversation about some of my earlier images that he wanted to buy as a present for his wife. They had a wedding anniversary coming up - it all sounded very plausible. In the end, of course, I realised that it was a scam but decided that it really shouldn’t prevent me from looking over some of my back catalogue of images from that period, particularly from the mid ‘80s onwards, when I first started out using my photography. When you pointed out the connection to the Arcadia images, I looked at it and thought ‘well that’s not my image, it looks a bit like my image’... Then we looked at it a bit more closely and realised that it really was an image behind something that had been superimposed, in the way of a graphic motif. (Designer Malcolm Garrett of Assorted Images was responsible for the layering of the images it transpired).
TS: It is interesting isn’t it, that during lockdown we had these various discussions about where images come from and what we’d done. I confessed to you that I’d recently been scammed- someone had professed an interest in buying my work and I’d fallen for it of course. Over some months we had had a conversation about some of my earlier images that he wanted to buy as a present for his wife. They had a wedding anniversary coming up - it all sounded very plausible. In the end, of course, I realised that it was a scam but decided that it really shouldn’t prevent me from looking over some of my back catalogue of images from that period, particularly from the mid ‘80s onwards, when I first started out using my photography. When you pointed out the connection to the Arcadia images, I looked at it and thought ‘well that’s not my image, it looks a bit like my image’... Then we looked at it a bit more closely and realised that it really was an image behind something that had been superimposed, in the way of a graphic motif. (Designer Malcolm Garrett of Assorted Images was responsible for the layering of the images it transpired).