Emma Hardy’s debut monograph is a tender document of motherhood, childhood, love, and letting go

Spanning 20 years, Permissions is a book wherein the cycles, rituals, and remnants of family life are scooped up, shuffled, and then set free

A wooden fence cuts across a dense hedgerow, dappled golden in the evening light. From above, sunlight cascades in white stripes, marked out by smoke which rises from the ground. Wherein lies a blaze – a burning wooden frame, by now blackened to charcoal, its silhouetted skeleton crumbling into the earth. No anonymous object is this, but the artist’s own forsaken treasure: a childhood bed, housed for decades in the Suffolk family home. And now, in the face of the family’s departure from this place, it has been sacrificed. “We made a ceremony of it”, Hardy recalls, with sombre emotion. And in a single pictorial frame, the bedframe is memorialised. 

Permissions is British artist Emma Hardy’s first monograph. The work spans two decades of her family’s life, curated over the course of the last year. It was a time when “I was thinking about how we’re leaving, and how everything’s changing,” she says. Permission, from the Latin permissionem, pertains not only to the notion of granting or allowing, but – as in Hardy’s interpretation – also to the act of giving up, letting pass, yielding, or loosening. The book is an act of an untethering of herself to the places she once belonged and yet won’t revisit. It is a book wherein the comings and goings, cycles, rituals, and remnants of life are scooped up, shuffled, and then set free.

For all that it observes life, Hardy’s art is not one of documentary but of storytelling, discreetly blending the candid with the composed. Images are conjured from the characters and objects in her orbit, tableaus arranged from the “reasons and ingredients that promote making a picture”. Often a composition would repeat itself in her mind – a field near her Suffolk home “packed with red poppies”, for example – moving her to set out with steadfast “intention and clarity” with her camera. But there is always a tension, a “schism… a bit of a tearing”, in navigating her tandem role as observer and participant. “If you were a good mother you’d be sitting down and reading a story,” she says. “I was always trying to meld the two… Trying to find a balance that is never findable.” 

It is a balancing act not unlike the dance of family life itself, wavering between the quotidian and the surreal. And indeed, the element of the unexpected is often helpful, she reveals: “I’m only ever really having a go.” But first and foremost, there is conscious endeavour. “I’m not interested in looking at or making pictures that don’t pose a narrative or invite me as a viewer to be curious”, she insists. And even revisiting contact sheets from 20 years ago, her instinct for what constitutes a successful image is unfaltering. “If it’s congruent with your intention, then that’s it”, she says. “Whatever the creative output is – when it works, it works – and as the creator you have to have some agency over that”. 

Permissions deals with the seasons of life. We encounter inky swims and winter flu, we feel the crackle of harvested wheat under foot, the frost on the windscreen. Tomatoes ripen on a sill, berries are picked and pricked, children climb the walls. Time itself warps in the book. Chapters of life are elided, others ratcheted-forward, in the way that memory meanders. In some chapters, images seem to carry the weight of an entire epoch, the breadth of the human condition, while others have a lightness of being that enables them to flicker and fade like fireflies.

Occasionally, the camera is offstage, attentive instead of incidental table-top arrangements and weather-filled landscapes – elements both integral to, yet out of kilter with the temporality of home. Yet “in each, there’s a backstory”, Hardy insists: goggles on the edge of a pool, a cut finger in a doorway, a phonecall on the lawn. Try not to Blink [below] is a spectral confrontation of an image, Hardy’s daughter veiled in white, eyes glazing over in mimicry of the camera’s dulcet focus. It is a photograph that approaches slow motion. Three pages on, the same child is alert, dynamic, insect-like on the floor, absorbed in a game of cards. She is framed not by the steely black of a classic portrait, but backlit with the lights of a living room. And instead of a veil, white curtains flank her figure. Childhood innocence in two frames. “I didn’t make them to share,” Hardy says of her pictures. “They are genuinely personal”. 

“To learn to do a thing, to do it for one of life’s first times is to be unnatural in the activity”, writes Alice Zoo (photographer, writer, and BJP contributor) in the book’s essay. “It is to be a pretender, a performer, as though experimenting with the possible bounds of a gesture, trying it on for size”. Permissions may be Hardy’s first book-making endeavour, but there is nothing remotely naive or performative about its presentation. Instead, there is an unselfconsciousness which yields a fluency to its pages. It was a process of gentle and patient distillation, Hardy describes, “like a bunch of stuff shaking up in a jar, slowly clearly”. 

This spirit rises to the surface most clearly in Hardy’s series of floral still lifes, each titled in Latin, serving as the book’s eight chapter headings. “Eight is an amazing number energetically”, Hardy says. Tulips, Fritillaries, hellebores – all blooms Hardy herself had nurtured and adored, photographed during her last spring in the house. They are photographed splayed on the stone kitchen counter, the central axis to her role in the home, bearing all the marks of its use. It was a “very profound” endeavour, she says. “A real marking of time. A eulogy. I let them lie there so they wilted… It became quite a solemn process”. 

Rhythm, texture and tone are instinctual to Hardy. She is a master of light and colour, coaxing these elements onto the pictorial surface in the way she does with her human subjects – with tenderness and optimism. Her vision comes through the prism of a student of art history, and as an ardent follower of “almost exclusively female photographers” during her early 20s of living in Paris. She cites Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Nan Goldin, and Tina Barney among her biggest inspirations. “I think it’s really hard to make work in a vacuum without any energetic influences”, she says. “In order for a candle flame to light, there’s got to be oxygen–- the oxygen of the world around, the people around bring it to life”. Yet, in spite of these external forces, Permissions refrains from falling into step with any entrenched mythologies of ‘home’, or ‘family’ or ‘motherhood’. Nostalgia is guarded with an intimacy and honesty that approaches the confessional. “I learned so much about letting go, about non-attachment, about a certain freedom”, she says. “But in order to let go, you have to be holding on first”. 

For all its gravity of emotion – grief spliced through with joy – Permissions settles in one’s lap like a child curling up after a meal. It offers a gentle illumination, a loving warmth, but with a glow that lingers long after the event, reverberating into dark corners. Its spirit lies in this gesture as much as its objectivity – in the act of staying until the end, soaking up the last warmth of the candle after the wick has burnt out. It is then that we are given the permission to leave. 

Permissions by Emma Hardy is published by GOST Books.

The photographer will be signing copies of the book at Polycopies, Paris at 7pm on 11 November 2022.

An exhibition of the project will be on display at 10 14 Gallery, London from 01 December 2022 to 27 January 2023.