Rachel Fleminger Hudson on Nostalgia, Reality, and The Internet

‘Everyone knows from our relationship with images, in terms of screenshotting and saving, that people feel that other people's images are their own’ artist Rachel Fleminger Hudson says as she sips her tea, perched on a white step ladder opposite me. It’s undeniable ‘The feed’ as we now refer to it as - be it Instagram, Tiktok, or otherwise - has exacerbated our image-obsessed culture of today. Photography has never been so immediate, and the dialogue between author and audience never so instantaneous, wide-reaching, and uncontrollable. ‘I had some images that went quite viral of Mia Goth. I felt really exposed, because I felt like they were me, but then at the same time, they have been stripped of me because they are now decontextualised from me. I didn't realise how personal they were’, she adds. The 27-year-old is in the process of moving between studios, whose walls bear the inner workings of her creative mind through life-size drawings and detailed diagrams, which I'm privy to as we talk.

‘When you create an image, you’re pulling on your own bank of references. I don't just mean in a fashion image-making way, I mean you quite literally draw on who you are, and so much of who I am is related to this online archive of images of the 1970s. My memories are really related to other people's photographs from the 1970s,’ says Fleminger Hudson. Whether directing fashion films for Miu Miu, photographing covers for Dazed, Self Service, and Luncheon, or working with rock musicians, the multi-disciplinary artist stays consistent in employing a detailed construction of the 1970s. Hudson calls it ‘a flattening’ – where time and culture are frozen, and contemporary ideas can be explored away from the clutter of the present day.

The impulse to be hyperbolicly maximalist, minimalism, ironic, and to explore commercialism in art and culture is conceptually and aesthetically appealing to Fleminger Hudson, ‘I find those impulses a lot in the 1970s’ she says, a decade straddling the boundaries of modernism and post modernism. She tells me she’s always lived in the past to a degree, creating zines about the 1960s when she was a child, but it was during her time at Central Saint Martins that her current obsession really flourished. ‘I thought I was living in the 1970s, and if you look at my life, I dress in 1970s clothes, and I have for years. I've lived a life online, and I think that I didn't understand that for a really long time’ she explains. Whilst studying, she earned the prestigious Dior Art of Colour Photo Award in 2022 for her distinctive visual style and character development, entrenched in her relationship with the past through the internet. As mentioned in her recent panel discussion at this year’s Photo London, hosted by Rosalind Jana, Fleminger Hudson explores ‘highly complex and confusing nostalgia’ – where reality and the online merge – as only a child of the internet could.

‘Before I was doing image research, I was looking at hundreds of thousands of clothes on eBay. A good evening for me would be looking through the entire 1970s section on eBay. That's like 5,000 garments or more. Then I'd segue into the 60s or 50s. I did that for years, and going to markets and trying to find things,’ says Fleminger Hudson. Though primarily known for her photographic work, the artist's creative practice spans filmmaking, art direction, costume design and set design, and it’s always rooted in rigorous months-long research. Online imagery, archive zines, real 70s clothing worn daily, and memories of her grandparents – their stories of times gone by – are all touchpoints of the artist. ‘My work is almost anti-nostalgic, because of my desire to overcome that far awayness, negating that distance. The feeling of nostalgia is unbearable. I can't bear the distance, and so I go towards the subject’ Fleminger Hudson notes.

This seeming contradiction is precisely what makes the artist's work so complex, at times ambiguous, and establishes her artistic aura. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project has been a key area of interest for Fleminger Hudson, through university and into her practice today – Benjamin’s exploration of commodity fetish and consumer culture is as pertinent in relation to the internet, and the commodification of the artist and artwork, as to Paris’ 19th century arcades. Not one to follow blindly, ‘He thinks that a photograph has no aura, because they can be reproduced. But I feel my work has an aura, because it's created over such a long period of time’ she says, likening – though careful not to equalise – the image research process to applying layers of paint to a canvas, before that final intuitive shutter release.

It’s unquestionable that the chronically online standard of interaction today has reshaped the way we create and consume art: ‘Because of the internet and social media, I don't know if the gaze can exist in the same way that it used to, the layers to which images are consumed are just different. Say very simply “I'm going to take a really interesting, like radical photograph of my friend and it's going to be a really sexual image” that in itself is the female gaze, because you're a woman and you're doing it. Then you upload it online – that destroys you. The male gaze, the female gaze, I don't know if they exist in the same way, I feel like they don't’ she tells me. The audience has never been so involved in the extended life of an artwork as today, and the speed of production has never been so demanding. How different would the work of Man Ray, Diane Arbus, or Deborah Turbeville be in the age of social media?

Leading up to the turn of the millennium, the legendary and ever prophetic David Bowie observed that ‘There is a breakdown’, between art, artist, and audience – predicting that ‘The grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about’: Fleminger Hudson is working in the midst of it. ‘I think that we live in a time where things are meant to be right or wrong, to be conclusive, and to speak to a very large globalised opinion on things, and I'm very aware that those things are vitally important, but they can also actually crush subjectivity.’ she says. As with any time of rapid change, there are no clear answers for how to move forward, what’s essential is that we continue to question and if we can be sure on one thing, it's that the bridge between the present and past has never been so short.