Galleries: Field Work

East Anglia is one of England’s most rural and agricultural regions. It is where the Romans grew their wheat and barley, and where many family owned traditional agrarian farms once flourished, continuing a rural culture that had a lineage extending back to the region’s peasant farmers of the Middle Ages. Today, in the age of industrial agribusiness that dominates this flat, richly fertile landscape, most of the traditional family farms have gone.

These photographs were made between 2001 and 2008 in the East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. They tell the story of what is left of the region’s agrarian community – the stoical small-time farmers who continue to work the fields because it is the only way of life that they know. These are the forgotten people of the flatlands, whose identity is intimately shaped by the landscape upon which they live work.

To enter into this agrarian world is to experience a way of life that is deeply rooted to the past and its memories. Traditional methods and knowledge are still very much depended upon. The old ways are proven to work, so there is no need to change. Central to this agrarian way of life is the importance of land. Not just working on the land, living on the land and owning the land, but process of landscape becoming physically and psychological engrained in the human experience. Over generations the farmer comes to know the histories and biographies of his local landscape. From the fields to the domestic interiors of the farms, the presence of the land is always there.

I have spent many hours in the fields, patiently watching how man and the landscape intimately shape each other. If I am looking closely, occasionally I am offered a glimpse into the mystery of this ancient relationship. It is a fleeting moment; I click the shutter; and I wait….