For Hedison, photography has always contained an essential contradiction. The medium is built to fix an image – to hold a fraction of time still, render it stable, and make it repeatable. Yet, across a practice spanning more than three decades, Hedison has repeatedly sought out the places where that stability begins to falter.

Her photographs have moved between interior and exterior, architecture and landscape, presence and absence. In The In Between (2017–19), the glass fronts of Parisian shop windows collapsed reflection, interior, and city into a single image. During the COVID pandemic, unable to travel as she previously had, Hedison returned to the darkroom. The resulting series, A Brief Infinity (2022–23), dispensed with the camera altogether as she worked with chemigrams and photograms, relinquishing many of the photographic decisions on which she had long relied.

“I wasn’t interested in returning to photography as I had practiced it before,” she says of the period that followed. “I wanted to return to the camera, but with a different relationship to it.”

This mutable relationship with her medium is at the heart of her latest body of work, The Conditions of Exposure (2026). Shot using a manual Olympus – one of the first cameras Hedison ever used – the series employs rolls of film that have been expired for some 25 years. Hedison first photographs a landscape or architectural space, physically rewinds the film, and exposes it again, this time including her own likeness in the form of a self-portrait. She cannot know precisely where one frame will meet another, or even whether horizontal and vertical orientations will collide. The process is deliberate; its outcome is not.

The series began in Malibu, where Hedison grew up, after fires had transformed a landscape intimately bound to her own history. Among the sites she photographed was the ground on which her childhood home had stood. “I became interested in the idea of a place carrying evidence of what happened to it,” she explains.

From there, questions that have circulated through Hedison’s practice for years – memory and the threshold between apparently opposing states – began to converge. In the lead-up to Frieze London, Southern Guild spoke with Hedison about the evolution of The Conditions of Exposure, the processes and materials shaping the work, and the ideas and motivations underpinning this new series.

Your practice has moved through large-format film, digital, and camera-less photography, and now 35mm double exposure. What drives those shifts in process?

Alex Hedison: There’s always been this play between what I can control and what is just going to happen. Especially since COVID, I’ve been experimenting in the darkroom with film and different mediums. The process is part of the thinking. A large-format camera requires a very different kind of attention than a 35mm, or if I’m using my phone. The phone has become a ubiquitous photographic tool, a way of documenting and often curating our lives and the image we present to the world. I toyed with the question of: what would a selfie look like shot with a manual 35mm Olympus? It’s impossible. Well, it’s possible, but you can’t control it.

When I started working with film, I learned that film itself is a material. It’s like a painter deciding: am I using acrylic? Am I using oil? Why am I using these materials in particular? Fujifilm is different from Kodak film. It has different coloration; there are different things you can achieve with it.

For this work, I went into a box of expired film I had from when I first started shooting. It’s 25 years old. Expired film is unreliable. It’s defective. But the defects in the film are an indication of its memory. Film has memory; it records. Much like a spool of thread, if you undo it, it curls back into itself the same way. That thread, like film, has a similar kind of memory over time.

The return to analogue photography is therefore not nostalgic. Hedison deliberately chose a camera with limitations and film whose age has made its behaviour less predictable. Constraint becomes generative: a way of creating circumstances in which the artist can make deliberate choices without determining their consequences.

You’ve spoken before about relinquishing compositional control. How has your relationship with control evolved through this new work?

AH: All of these decisions create the conditions in which something can happen that I didn’t completely author. That’s the most important thing to me. I don’t want a photograph to simply illustrate an idea I’ve already had. I want the making of it to embody the process of discovery.

The practice runs the risk of becoming fixed, especially when I’ve made work, put it out into the world, and it’s been received well. When work sells, collectors often want more of what has been made already. That’s also a tension I work with in my practice. In the darkroom, an image gradually emerges, then becomes fixed. It becomes stable, reliable, something that is no longer going to change. That’s the point of photography: through a series of carefully controlled chemical processes, you arrive at a fixed image. I’m interested in challenging that certainty, both in what an image depicts and in the way it comes into being. How can I use the medium to disrupt its own promise of permanence? How can I introduce uncertainty into a process designed to eliminate it?

If we’re really going to get philosophical about it, we are always in flux. The idea of being fixed is an illusion. My work is about the process of shifting and change and the unknown, because that is reality. We’re just under the illusion – or the delusion – that we have control.

And yet the decision to surrender control is itself very deliberate.

AH: It has to be that conscious for me because I’m kind of a control freak. I have to consciously introduce elements that are going to challenge me.

Even within an environment like the darkroom, where I’m doing chemigrams and something completely unexpected happens that I can’t control, what is my first impulse? “Let me do that again. How did I do that? Let me repeat it.” But the first time, I wasn’t repeating anything. I was just in the process of discovery.

That moment of reveal is deferred by working with film. Hedison describes collecting a processed roll from the lab as “like Christmas”: the delay separates the process of making from the moment of seeing, returning surprise to a medium increasingly defined by immediacy.

Some images fail completely. Others, she describes as miracles.

What happens in that moment when you finally see an image you could never have fully anticipated?

AH: With film, so much of the work happens as you’re doing it: choosing the film, choosing the camera, trying to adjust to the conditions. With digital, the time is reversed. You can shoot a thousand images in a minute. The camera adjusts to the light; it’s automatic. Afterwards, most of the time is spent editing because you have to pull the image out of the digital file. It’s very different.

With film, there is such pleasure in not knowing. You set out with an intention, you use your camera, you take photographs, and you are fully in the moment. Then, that moment is gone and you’re in another moment. You pick up your developed film from the lab and it’s a discovery.

That’s what happened with this. Some of what I shot in Malibu was completely obscured because I’d shot something else over them. They didn’t work. And then there were other things that were – excuse my language – fucking miracles. Things I could never have controlled.

I love when things line up in a certain way, and I will try to control it to the end of time. So, when I relinquish control completely and the composition is better than anything I could have manufactured, there’s nothing greater. As an artist, there is nothing more exciting.

There is another form of return embedded in ‘The Conditions of Exposure’. The Olympus Hedison now uses is the same camera with which she documented a self-portrait in 1997 that would become particularly significant. The portrait would mark a professional threshold for Hedison, recording her transition from actor to artist.

At what she remembers as her final audition, Hedison noticed how beautiful the light was in a nearby bathroom and used the final two frames of a roll: one photographed into the mirror, the other with the camera turned towards herself. In the darkroom, she exposed the two negatives onto a single sheet of paper without knowing exactly how they would meet. The resulting image divides her body across a horizontal line.

Almost three decades later, the work destined for Frieze London was also made from the final two frames of a roll of film.

You described The Conditions of Exposure as a return – not only to this camera, but also to an earlier self. What does “return” mean to you now?

AH: Using the Olympus is literally a return. It’s the first camera I ever photographed with, and there’s something strange and really moving about picking it up after all these years.

I am in conversation with my earlier work, and I’m very much in conversation with my earlier self. I’m in a huge transition in my life where it’s important for me to go back, to return to my most essential self.

I’m interested in what happens when I use an old tool, return to an old idea, and meet myself in the present. It’s less about going backwards than discovering that something you left behind is actually the most useful thing of all; it’s the most essential.

How does putting your body into the photograph change your relationship to the places you photograph?

AH: For so many years as an artist, I was behind the camera, looking at the world from a particular distance. I’ve been approaching this idea of transformation from a distance, from a very safe position.

When I put my own body into the image, I become part of the space that I’m photographing. I’m no longer simply observing a landscape or architecture. I’m testing my own relationship to it. There’s a vulnerability in that which I might once have resisted, but it was something I needed to do. It felt like the most true thing.

I’m not particularly interested in self-portraiture. I’m more interested in the body as another element within the photograph: a scale, a presence, a disruption. Something almost ghostlike, a trace of myself. A sense of myself from the past and who I’m becoming. The image becomes a reflection, something I’m exposing not only to you, but to myself.

The language of doubling extends beyond the mechanics of Hedison’s double exposures. Across her practice, she has repeatedly returned to oppositions – the natural and the man-made, interior and exterior, before and after, visibility and obscurity – and to what occurs along the line that ostensibly separates them.

In ‘The Conditions of Exposure’, that inquiry becomes literal. Two moments, two spaces, and two images are made to occupy the same frame.

Your work has long been concerned with thresholds and the spaces between seemingly disparate states. What continues to interest you about that territory?

AH: I’m often playing with binaries, to the tension between two seemingly indisputable fixed points. Black and white. Male and female. Then and now. I’m interested in what happens between those points of resistance. The thresholds where one state begins to shift into another, where things become less certain, where something unexpected emerges.

The double exposure creates the literal in-between: two moments, two spaces, two images occupying the same piece of film. Introducing my own body creates another kind of threshold. I’m both the person making the photograph and the body moving through it, both behind the camera and within the image.

The space between binaries becomes less of a boundary and more like a field in which two things can coexist. The image doesn’t have to resolve the tension between them. What if we allow the contradictions to remain, without needing to reconcile them?

Is that resistance to resolution also part of what you mean by The Conditions of Exposure?

AH: The idea of exposure is obviously very intentional. There’s the photographic meaning of exposure – the exposure of film to light. But there’s also the condition under which the exposure happens: the place, the material, chance, the decisions I make, and all of the things I can’t control.

Then there’s the more personal meaning of exposure. Putting my own body into the work changes the stakes. There’s a vulnerability in allowing myself to be seen within these places, particularly because I’d spent so many years making photographs without being physically present in them.

I like that the word “exposure” doesn’t offer resolution. Exposure can mean revealing something, but it can also mean being subjected to something: to light, to weather, to risk, to circumstance. And that feels very close to where I am with the work now and where I am in my life.

I’m interested in what happens when you establish certain conditions and then allow the image – and perhaps myself – to be exposed in an environment and in a way that I can’t completely predict.

Work from The Conditions of Exposure will be on view with Southern Guild at Frieze London, Booth C1, from 14–18 October 2026.