Alexandra Fuller describes attention as the closest thing she has to a devotional practice. Her photographs are what remain after she has stayed with a place, animal, person or gesture longer than ordinary life usually permits.
That relationship with looking began before photography. Fuller was a “writerly kid,” full of images she could see internally but could not draw. At eleven, her father gave her an old Nikon. The camera became the missing instrument: a way to express what she could already imagine and a companion to a writing practice that never disappeared.
A reason to stay
Fuller is self-taught. When she failed to win a place in her high-school photography class, she volunteered to manage the darkroom and learned there instead. At university she became photo editor of the student newspaper, gaining access to film she could bulk-load herself.
More important than the technical knowledge was what the camera permitted socially and emotionally. A photographer can look longer. For Fuller, that became a way to feel the world rather than simply see it.
Then she stopped. As photography moved rapidly toward digital, she could not afford the new equipment and spent roughly twenty years making films, building a family and a career. She returned to still photography at forty, carrying two decades of writing and directing with her.
Land that looks empty and is not
Fuller lives in Boulder, Utah, surrounded by the sandstone landscape of the Grand Staircase–Escalante region. She is drawn to vast places because their scale can shrink human problems, but her photographs resist the idea that these landscapes are empty.
She notices the evidence that someone was there: initials cut into aspen bark, tire marks on salt flats, fences, abandoned rail cars. At the same time she photographs the reverse—wildness entering human spaces: an animal in a doorway, a bird leaving a frame, a dog pushing through a fence, an insect in a child’s hand.
Across years of work, certain forms keep returning without being deliberately summoned: disturbed water, shadows, birds, bodies behind barriers and, especially, openings. Doors, gaps, curtains and thresholds recur so often that Fuller has stopped treating them as coincidence.
Friction, material and the Great Salt Lake
Analogue process matters to Fuller because it introduces friction. The delay and uncertainty make attention more deliberate. In Dissolution, photographed along the Great Salt Lake over several years, that material relationship became literal. Fuller gathered salt from the lake and used it with silver nitrate to make salt prints of photographs made along its shoreline, later toning them in gold.
The lake salt was impure, and the prints recorded those impurities alongside the marks of the maker’s hand. For Fuller, this is not a rejection of digital tools. She scans negatives and makes large digital negatives when the process requires it. What matters is retaining a physical relationship to the image and making objects that remind viewers that imperfection, damage and wildness still belong to the real world.
Leaving film and coming back
Fuller’s twenty years in filmmaking changed the way she now thinks about still photographs. Sequence, rhythm and the weight one image gives another became part of her photographic language. Her return accelerated in 2020, when a documentary project stalled both ethically and practically. A potential funder wanted a more sensational story than Fuller believed was true to the people she had known for years; then the pandemic made the collaborative mechanics of filmmaking nearly impossible.
She returned to still images and poems. What began as a retreat became a rediscovery.
From concept to instinct
For several years after returning, Fuller made clearly defined projects: an idea came first, followed by images built to explore it. Meanwhile another body of work accumulated in the background—photographs made instinctively, before she understood what connected them.
She is now editing that archive into a body of work called Great Good Fortune. The recurring motifs are stranger and more insistent than she expected: animals at openings, marks left on wild landscapes, reflections, hands, barriers and small ritual-like gestures. Fuller is printing the work in silver gelatin and wants it eventually to become a photobook, where repetition and duration can operate across pages the way time operates in film.
Attention as care
Fuller does not describe photography primarily as recording. It is a way of joining. Carrying a camera closes distance and grants attention to whatever is placed inside the frame.
“The looking is the whole point” is the clearest summary of her practice. Sustained attention becomes a form of care. What we keep looking at, she suggests, is less likely to disappear unnoticed—and the act of looking changes both the observer and the observed.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the film we develop.
