Leah Frances
Leah Frances is a Canadian photographer born in Alert Bay, Canada, now based in Easton, Pennsylvania. Frances’ work has been featured in numerous print and online platforms including The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed and more and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In December 2021 she graduated with an MFA in photography from The Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Her first sold out photo book, “American Squares,” debuted in September 2019 at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 and was quickly featured by T, The New York Times Style Magazine, in their “T Suggests: Things our Editors Like” column. Her second book of photography, “Lunch Poems,” was released this past October (now sold out). Esquire named it a “Favorite Photo Book of Fall 2022.”
An exclusive collection of Leah’s "American Squares" prints is now represented by The MF Gallery.
Interview by Dana Stirling
First, tell us a little about your first experience with photography? What made you want to be a photographer?
Hi! I took a photography class during high school and loved it so much that I spent every lunch hour in the darkroom and every day after school and on weekends making pictures. I even set up my own darkroom in my basement and in my boyfriend’s bathroom. My teacher encouraged me to pursue photography in university but, coming from a small town in Canada, I couldn’t imagine how that could lead to any kind of career. Then, later on, I moved to NYC where I worked in magazines. One of my jobs was to “look at color” in a light booth twice a day, to make sure images would print well on press. I got to see some incredible photography up close, such as that of William Eggleston, Mark Steinmetz and Stephen Shore, among many others. It was when the Shore pictures came in that I was really blown away. He said he hadn’t done any work on them, but the light was so incredible I felt compelled to buy my first camera as an adult. I took my next vacation to Los Angeles and blissfully made photos, walking all the way from Silver Lake to Beverly Hills. I haven’t turned back. (That said, it’s still difficult for me to convincingly refer to myself as a photographer!)
Can you tell us more about your experiences in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, during your residency at The Pouch Cove Foundation? What drew you to this location initially?
I had visited Newfoundland, and Pouch Cove, several times before being invited to a residency at The Pouch Cove Foundation for the month of October 2023. I suppose I was initially drawn to it because it’s similar to where I am from: Vancouver Island, British Columbia. I seem to be drawn to green, windy, rainy places. (Another favorite is Scotland.) I had previously spent time in Newfoundland as a tourist, but an entire month, essentially alone, without a car, in a place with no third spaces — no gathering places — turned out to be another thing entirely. The experience was extremely isolating. I write about that in the introduction to the book maquette I made from that time, Sea Fever.
You mentioned spending hours walking Main Road in search of photographic subjects. Can you describe one particularly memorable encounter you had during these walks?
Yes, I put an enormous amount of pressure on myself during the entire month, and during those walks on what was called “Main Road”. I structured my days around them because I really needed something to structure my days! I also needed, somewhat desperately (or so it felt), to come out of the residency with a body of work. I had left my job in order to spend the month there and I was keenly aware of how risky and perhaps… not smart (!) that was. A residency, I found out, can be a great way to push oneself and indeed, to make a body of work but I don’t know how “regular people,” and by that I mean working people, people without a great deal of money to spare, are supposed to be able to take the time out to have that experience.
But I digress! I remember every person I met on those walks very keenly. I only ran into a few people during my time there and I very much wanted to photograph people, so I was extremely nervous when I would see someone in the distance. I HAD to make a photo, was what I was thinking. There was this one older gentleman I saw ambling toward me, way in the distance, up a hill. We were headed toward each other for a good half hour and I let me nerves build the whole time. When he finally got close, I saw he was eating an apple that he was cutting with a pocket knife. The sun was glinting off the knife and I thought it would make a great portrait. I got out my Rolleiflex and made several images. When I got my film developed I found that I had missed focus by 1/4 of an inch. They were not usable. If I had been making more fluid pictures, I could have found a way to fit one in, but all the other portraits were very sharp. It felt it would have appeared like the mistake that it was.
Loneliness seems to be a recurring theme in your work from Pouch Cove. How did this emotion influence your creative process and the subjects you chose to photograph?
I’ve only recently come to the conclusion that loneliness is at the heart of all of my work! I focussed heavily on third places in my last book, Lunch Poems, photographing quintessentially American spaces, such as diners, empty in order to highlight the division in this country and the way we are no longer gathering as we once did. Here, I found myself in a village with no pub, no coffee shop and only one, tiny, takeout restaurant with erratic hours and no dining area. There was an overturned milk crate in front of the one convenience store where some folks would occasionally sit. Or they might get a cup of coffee from that store and stand across the road, looking out at the sea.
In the past I have photographed scenes that I thought typified loneliness and isolation, which I see as a real crisis in our society — an existential crisis and loneliness has also been proven to be a serious health crisis. But in Pouch Cove, I was making photographs while being deeply lonely myself. I wasn’t getting back into the car where my husband and some music and a coffee was waiting for me. I was exhausted and walking in the rain, alone. This influenced the way I chose to frame my pictures. I tried as hard as I could to make the viewer aware of my mood and the fact that I was there and this was my experience. I may have projected my feelings onto my subjects too. The book is as much about photography as it is about that place. With AI becoming more a part of the conversation, I’m interested in making more personal work, where you can hopefully see that the pictures are made by a human with a point of view. I don’t think photography is well understood, frankly. The fact that if you want to actually communicate something, and you’re not a studio photographer, you have to go out driving or walking in the world and hope to see the thing that expresses what you want to say. Then you need to photograph it in the light that helps you to convey your thoughts, and from the angle that amplifies your thoughts, etc… etc. I don’t think people know how difficult that can be, and how much depends on chance in addition to sheer doggedness! It’s incredibly difficult to keep believing that a meaningful body of work might emerge in the end.
Can you walk us through your creative process when working on a new photography project? How do you go from the initial concept to the final image?
I don’t have any one process. I am currently sitting in my studio which has five different projects tacked up on the walls, floor to ceiling. I’m not terrifically confident in any of them, and that worries me. There are also others foldered on my desktop. I do make a lot of photograph and I am always printing. It’s my hope that, by pushing myself out the door as often as possible and sort of letting the camera guide me, as vague as that sounds, what’s going on in my mind will emerge. As soon as I grasp onto strands of what’s going on, and they start coming clear in my pictures, then I head out to make work with more of an idea in mind. I’m not sure that starting a project with a very specific thesis in the first place, a complete idea, would necessarily work for me. I kind of have to arrive at it sideways. My experience in Pouch Cove, however, happened very quickly. Quite literally on my first evening there, I was Googling whether it was normal to be overwhelmingly lonely at an artist residency. Those feelings were ones I couldn’t shake off and I was aware they were influencing my work pretty much from the beginning. So I leaned into them.
What advice would you give to aspiring photographers who want to capture the essence of their personal experiences and convey deeper meanings through their work?
The answer is probably in the question! I would say that if you want to convey a deeper meaning, or any meaning, through your work you are at least part way there. I don’t know how this is going to sound… but I don’t think it’s too difficult to make “nice pictures.” We can all can make one-off pictures that someone may want to hang on their wall. I see this all the time on platforms such as Instagram; a bunch of lovely pictures which don’t communicate any central message. Which is fine, by the way. But wanting to convey meaning, or to communicate something, that’s where the deep work is, in my opinion. That’s why I love photo books so much too. I find that so much meaning can be added in the edit and in the sequencing. So I don’t know, I’m not an expert but I would say pick something that is truly meaningful to you, relax, and make a bunch of pictures—way more than you might imagine and for much longer than you might imagine — thinking about that subject. Print them if you can. See what stands out to you. Show them to other photographers if you can. Follow the strands that seem to be emerging (they may well be different than your original intention). And then, I would say aim for a book, even if it’s self-published. There is nothing wrong with that! Print it and get it in a bunch of peoples’ hands any way that you can. For me personally, a body of work feels most “finished” in book form.
