I have photographed these sisters, Sam and Lizzy, many times, in many costumes, over many years. This was a particularly difficult time in my life. It was late February, and my mum had been killed in a car crash the September before. After she died, I just wasn’t interested in photography. My mother had liked to sew when I was young, so instead I started cutting up old clothes or using scraps to make crude flags. I was just trying to make sense of what was happening in my world. I thought I might use them as props in the future.
I was also going for daily walks with my dog, and a few houses down the road I came across this bizarrely tied-together pegboard fence. I see things cinematically. Bits of stories emerge from whatever I’m looking at. This image came from me sitting at my mother’s sewing machine, sewing those flags, and then finding that fence. I called up Sam and Lizzy and said: “I really need to do a picture – I need you to come over.”
I’ve been collecting uniforms for a long time. I link it to my mother and my Roman Catholic upbringing, and the fact that we’re from a military family – my dad was a pilot. There was always a uniform tucked around somewhere. The ceremony, the iconography, the formality all appealed to me. This shot wasn’t so much about the specific uniform the girls are wearing, but the palette of those red jackets against that pink fence.
It was the middle of winter, on a day that had started out cloudy but then we got this really nice band of light. I love how alike the girls look. They’re a year apart, but even their mother couldn’t tell who was who in the picture. They’re not professional models, but I knew I could do something interesting with them.
I didn’t realise why at the time, but I needed a sense of forward movement in the poses they struck. My mother was on my mind on the day of the shoot. “It’s time,” she’d say, “time to do what you do.” She was always creative, and very encouraging. After the shoot, because I wasn’t really working, I had the luxury of being able to spend several months manipulating the image, printing and reprinting it. I was thinking about Velázquez and working on the lights and darks – the different blacks, in particular.
This was in the months leading up to to the 2016 election. I’m from Texas, and I split my time between Dallas and Marfa, which is about 60 miles from the Mexican border. It’s hard to not think about the border when you live here. This image might not be a traditional version of what Texas looks like, but to me it is quite Texan, at least in my fantasy world.
I started thinking about the role fantasy plays in everything – identity politics, cultural pluralism, nationalism – and these blended geographic areas that are constantly changing. I started researching the archetypes of the wild west and how they were interpreted by the Italians and the Spanish in spaghetti westerns. I watched a lot of Sergio Leone movies – I must have rewatched the last 10 minutes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly 100 times – and listened to Quentin Tarantino interviews. And so this image launched an entire project, a contemporary staged spaghetti western, entitled Smoke Bombs and Border Crossings, which featured three main archetypal characters: the military soldier, the American cowboy and the Mexican charro, or traditional horseman.
I’ve had such a strange few years. I had my own car wreck last year, very close to where my mother died. I broke both legs, in several places, and an arm. I was sort of in that same kind of mental state, where I have had to put down my camera, but I’m getting to the point where I can pick it up again. I’m trying to be brave enough to. People ask you when you’re going to be better. You’re not better, you’re just different. I’m getting on with it, handling my life day by day, trying to make images in a new way.
Nancy Newberry’s CV
Born: San Antonio, Texas, 1968.
Training: Self-taught.
Influences: “So many … Travel, my mom, of course, Stephen Shore, Ana Mendieta, Henry Darger, Velázquez, anything that’s in the Prado museum in Madrid.”
High point: “This picture being in the National Portrait Gallery.”
Low point: “There are a lot of low points when you’re an artist. But the last year, after my accident, has been the hardest time of my life.”
Top tip: “To keep looking.”
• Nancy Newberry: Smoke Bombs and Border Crossings/Articles of Faith is at Departure Lounge, Luton, until 1 February.
