Interview with Simone Frances, Photographer for HSFF's Old Santa Fe Today

Simone Frances, Laboratory of Anthropology, Director’s Residence for the new and fifth edition of Old Santa Fe Today

For our blog, HSFF’s Development Coordinator Melanie McWhorter interviews Simone Frances about her work, living in New Mexico, and photographing architectural spaces including images from her thesis project and the contemporary illustrations for Old Santa Fe Today. The book is slated to be released by the Museum of New Mexico Press in fall 2021.

Melanie McWhorter: How did you end up at the College of Santa Fe program in the early 2000s?

Simone Frances: My father served in the army during the Vietnam War. He was a pilot and an aircraft mechanic. We started visiting the southwestern states when I was young, and, having grown up just south of Canada, I wanted to get away from trees and snow and mud. Now, of course, I miss trees, snow, and mud.

MM: That lead you to the antique photographic printer speciality? Where did you work on the older photographer processes and why that niche?

SF: I met Anna Strickland, the Rhode Island School of Design professor and artist, in 2009 while living in Belfast, Maine. Ms. Strickland taught antique and alternate photographic processes at RISD for many decades. Her career as a photographer was largely focused on climate and environmental changes as well as a deep conceptual intersection with Buddhism and the resilience within the things we consider temporary. I printed with Ms. Strickland for many years. She was a generous mentor and motivator, as she advocated for artists to pursue their work regardless of the absence of commercial or institutional support. I was given volumes of experience and knowledge in platinum, gum bichromate, and other early photographic techniques, but the lasting gift of working with Ms. Strickland was her commitment to the practice and to the work, which is rare and invaluable.

© Simone Frances from her series Isolate to a Controllable Space

© Simone Frances from her series Isolate to a Controllable Space

MM: Why did you choose the University of New Mexico program? What do you feel are the strength of this program or some of your most valuable take-aways from your studies and research there? 

SF: The photography program at UNM is nationally renowned and has been for many decades. I will always be honored to have received my MFA there. The program structure adheres to an older model of MFA programs that provides its graduate students with the opportunity to teach within their field for three years. Additionally, my time as a fellow at the Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections provided a setting to expand my knowledge of descriptive language in the archive and library sciences and especially as it relates to the social and cultural understanding and dissemination of images. The archive is a complicated place, its mediation of materials, access, and curation. Because I came into graduate school as an older person with many life experiences, opportunities like this were really valuable for me. As my so-called studio practice was already well developed, I wanted to spend time teaching and building my experience more widely.

MM: Your previous projects are personal, seemingly autobiographical in a performative way, but also focus on what you call ‘the public arena of institutional architecture’ including the work produced for your thesis show, ‘isolate to a controllable space.’ Tell us a bit about what the term ‘the public arena of institutional architecture’ how this approach to the study of space guides how you photograph the architecture and structures, and how you visually explore their use, history, and narrative.

SF: My inquiries into architecture, and its reach into the delineated and named, commodified or neglected landscapes of public and private space, have led me to many places. Immersing in government and museum architecture of Mexico City, spatially confined routines of monastic life in rural Greece, to the free public experience of street and sidewalk living in Berlin, my comparative studies of the uses of public place and behavior of people in these spaces look toward our relationality. I think that we have a participatory and performative relationship with public space, and its intersection and influence into the private speaks to the nature of being as a negotiation with levels of obedience, a navigation through and around systems and space.

My earlier works were performative, exploring the intersection of quotidian spaces with confrontational gestures. As the images lack narrator, story, events, time, and sequence I eschew those elements and its collective whole.

© Simone Frances from her series Isolate to a Controllable Space

© Simone Frances from her series Isolate to a Controllable Space

MM: You were commissioned to shoot the new photographs for Old Santa Fe Today for Historic Santa Fe Foundation after a recommendation from a contemporary at UNM. Some of your previous work including from your thesis show helped HSFF in the decision to contract with you for the project. How did your previous projects on the public use of institutional architecture inform the shoots for Old Santa Fe Today?

SF: Through my previous and ongoing works, I acknowledge that systems like architecture are conductors of the relational and participatory processes of identification and categorization. We know that our ability to live and to move, and in what condition, is critically dependent on a corporeal placement in both private and public space. This placement is determined, and predetermined, by the prevailing order of things. This placement is also determined by a set of procedures working together as part of an interconnected network that includes, excludes, and ignores in ways that are relevant and beneficial to our dominant structures. I believe that these mechanisms are at work in all times in architecture; in primary and secondary homes, institutional buildings like schools and government buildings, prisons, parks, and businesses. I think that it is important not to mythologize architectural structures, to speak about why they came and what they were built for and what they still do. I think all architecture is active and implementing different types of social ordering. I am glad that HSFF was interested in having this type of working methodology inform the approach for photographing Old Santa Fe Today.

Simone Frances, Donaciano Vigil House for the new and fifth edition of Old Santa Fe Today

Simone Frances, Dodge Bailey House for the new and fifth edition of Old Santa Fe Today

Simone Frances, Donaciano Vigil House for the new and fifth edition of Old Santa Fe Today

MM: When shooting for Old Santa Fe Today, what are some of the interesting locations and features that you discovered? Any similarities amongst Santa Fe’s architecture? Any stories of note?

SF: All the images for Old Santa Fe Today were shot from February 2020 through October 2020. Of course this was/is a historically challenging period for everyone, not just in Santa Fe but state and worldwide. My primary goal was to accommodate the health and safety of everyone involved. The individuals who managed or owned these properties were incredibly generous to have me at locations and offer their time and enthusiasm to HSFF's goals.

MM: What are some of your current personal projects? Where do you see your career path leading in the future? 

SF: I am currently working on a duology of photographic print books entitled No Is A Place: The Metropolitan Museum of Art & Other Problems and This is Personal for you: Long standing observations & other horizons.

About the artist/interviewee
Simone Frances is a writer and architectural photographer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in coastal Maine. Frances received her BFA in photography in 2004 from the College of Santa Fe. After a long career as an antique photographic printer, Frances took her master’s in photography from the University of New Mexico in 2019, where she was a teacher of photography. Exhibiting locally and nationally, she has received awards and honors, such as the SITE Santa Fe Site Scholar, SOMA Mexico City Fellowship, the Fred M. Calkins Award, the Phyllis Muth Scholarship for Fine Arts, and the John L. Knight Award. Frances served as the Pictorial Fellow at the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections from 2017 to 2019. Frances’ research led her to the fields of visual culture and public environment. Her conceptual work is centered around the public arena of institutional architecture, physical and conceptual structures of whiteness, and the participatory and performative relationships of public space. She is the photographer for the new and fifth edition of Historic Santa Fe Foundation’s Old Santa Fe Today.

Simone Frances, Spitz Gardesky House for the new and fifth edition of Old Santa Fe Today

Simone Frances, Sheldon Parsons House and Studio for the new and fifth edition of Old Santa Fe Today

Simone Frances, Edwin Brooks House for the new and fifth edition of Old Santa Fe Today