“They could have sent her home. I was on the phone to officials in the airport from noon until 8pm. In the end, they released her into my custody for 12 hours: I had to bring her back first thing the next morning.”
Talking to photographer Valerie Phillips about her new book, You Left Your Ring on the Floor of My Bedroom, and hearing her story of trying to fly in her model and muse, Sara, to London from LA, feels like stepping into Narnia. Last year, immigration officials at Heathrow airport, suspecting something fishy about this transatlantic collaboration, refused Sara entry into the UK for the two weeks the pair had planned.
Sara has no criminal record and Phillips has full legal right to live in the UK, but she believes airport officials simply didn’t understand why anyone would pay to fly a stranger halfway around the world, just to take part in an unpaid art project. It was out of their realm of imagination. They let Sara in to the UK for just 12 hours. So while London slept, the pair spent a single, hysterical night running around the city, taking photographs of everything they could.
As a result, the images thrum with a quintessentially British, nocturnal fever. The tins of Heinz baked beans and ravioli in a fluoro-lit Costcutter corner shop, handstands against postboxes, Haribo sweets eaten in handfuls by a building site, cigarettes and Dr Martens on zebra crossings: it’s like watching a teenage rampage. It’s an explosion of identity and freedom after the depersonalising intimidation of airport interrogation and immigration control. But, like visitors to Narnia, once Sara was back on a plane, there was no trace of it having happened; no time had passed, nothing had changed.
“We were climbing the walls,” says Phillips, when we meet almost a year to the day since You Left Your Ring was shot. “It was such a crazy situation. I think it’s a better book for it. Sometimes these things just happen – and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Talking to Phillips about the project is endearing, ridiculous and more than a little mawkish. Apparently, from the moment Phillips saw Sara on Instagram, she knew she had to photograph her. “Looking at that photo, I felt like my brains had been splattered all over the coffee shop,” she says. “Somebody said, ‘She looks like a cowboy’, and it’s true.”
Phillips has previously photographed female stars including PJ Harvey, Florence Welch, Sienna Miller, Bat for Lashes, Amy Winehouse and Kim Gordon, and worked with several major fashion brands. She has encountered controversy, too, over her pictures of young-looking models. The child-like faces, knickers and visible nipples can make for an uncomfortable combination of provocative and innocent. “I’ve run into situations with that,” admits Phillips. “When I was doing a zine with a woman who was 21, the printers called me up and said, ‘How old is this girl? We could lose our licence.’ They made me email a copy of her driver’s licence – so we called the zine, This Is My Drivers’ Licence.”
What would she say to the accusation that she is sexualising young women? “Open your eyes and join the world: there’s no way these things could be made without total consent,” says Phillips, all whimsy gone. “People are in denial about the fact that teenagers are sexual beings, but that’s a simple, biological fact. I know what my morals and values are, and don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. I like the messiness of life. And these are appropriate-aged girls.”
The messiness of life is strewn across the pages of You Left Your Ring, from the late-night cigarettes and toothpaste spit, to the ripped shorts and Superman duvet. “I don’t like the idea of changing the way someone looks – why not just work with someone you find interesting?” says Phillips. “Sara was a beautiful maniac, climbing on lamp-posts, doing handstands on mailboxes, and making cartwheels in the middle of the road at 3am.”
As well as a jubilant messiness, the title of the book is also heavy with longing. Does she wonder how people will interpret that? “She did actually leave her ring on my bedroom floor,” says Phillips. “A few days after she left, I was sitting on the floor – I always work on the floor – and I found it. I stared at it and was like, oh my God, that did actually happen. It was real.”
