Fox completed her degree in Photography at
West Surrey College of Art and Design in
Farnham, Surrey in 1986 under tutors
Martin Parr,
Paul Graham and
Karen Knorr. Fox first came to attention with her 1988 documentary study of London office life on the mid-1980s,
Work Stations: Office Life in London. She is perhaps best known for her
Zwarte Piet series made between 1993 and 1998, published as the book
Zwarte Piet, which documents 'black face'
folk culture traditions in the
Netherlands. Between 2001 and 2003 she published four monographs in her "Made in" series:
Made in Milton Keynes,
Made in Kansas,
Made in Gothenburg and
Made in Florence. From 2009, Fox photographed for two years at
Butlins in Bognor Regis for her book ''Resort 1 - Butlin's Bognor Regis''. She currently works as head of photography at
University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. A retrospective 300-page book
Photographs 1983-2007 by
Val Williams was published by
Photoworks in 2007. In November 2009 Fox was shortlisted for the 2010
Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, held at the Photographers Gallery, London, and the 2012 Pilar Citoler Prize. In 2019, Fox was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the
Royal Photographic Society. The critic
Sean O'Hagan, reviewing ''Resort 1 - Butlin's Bognor Regis
in The Guardian'', said "Her work often hones in on the particular to suggest the universal, such as her series The Village (1991–1993), in which rural England becomes a pastiche of itself even as the individual lives glimpsed therein seem vividly real." David Chandler, in his essay
Vile Bodies, in the book
Anna Fox Photographs 1983-2007, said Fox is "widely regarded as an important part of what might be called the 'second wave' of British colour documentary photography" and that she "helped form its particular style of combative, highly charged use of flash and colour". ==Publications==