The Anthology of Rural Life is a photographic project that aims to produce an archive of material to document continuities and shifts in patterns of contemporary rural life.

The people and places in the images represent aspects of a rural society where the economic, social and cultural changes to the nature of work mean that traditional ways of life in the countryside are slowly evolving.

EXHIBITION  |  Kestle Barton  |  Summer 2024 

PENGELLY  |  2022 - Ongoing  |  Cornwall, UK 

Sympathy for the Devil


These photographs are part of a substantial photographic record of the surroundings, and activities of two elderly, unmarried brothers who farm in Cornwall.  They have spent their lives working on the same land, however failing health and advancing age are undermining the viable continuation of this farm. One brother manages the animals and oversees the general farm work, whilst the other organises their food and medical prescriptions. When not doing this, he spends much of his time listening to his record collection. The Rolling Stones are by far his favourite.

The historian Patrick Joyce points to the fallacy of how, in contemporary society, we ‘aspire to join our internal lives, our personal subjectivities, with ‘nature’ so that we can be ‘at one’ with it’.  As he says, ‘this is a universe that in the present takes the sentimental view of nature as alternatively a garden or a wilderness’. However, those born into traditional agricultural cultures may understand things differently.

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This work is on show as part of  ‘Ammeth: Farming in Cornwall’ at Falmouth Art Gallery - Link

LIZARD PENINSULA  |  2024  |  Cornwall, UK 

Farmers of the Lizard


In early 2024, we were commissioned by Kestle Barton Gallery to make a new series of portraits focusing on farming on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall.

We photographed a diverse range of farmers and farming families on the Lizard. These included both large and small producers and people relatively new to the region as well as those whose families have worked the same land for five, or even six, generations.

Whilst dairy farming is the dominant form of farming on the Lizard there are numerous examples of emerging patterns of diversification. These are clearly manifest in initiatives such as the growth of regenerative and organic models, shifts from crop production to horticulture and in the subsidising of farming through tourism and farm shops.  

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A portfolio of the Lizard portraits will be housed at the Cornish archive Kresen Kernow as part of an on-going collection of ARL work.

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︎ Further text from this project HERE


DOĞU TRAKYA // TURKEY  |  Feb 2024  |  Turkey, Eastern Thrace


DOĞU TRAKYA


During February 2024 we photographed in Eastern Thrace, Turkey, a European edgeland situated between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara and connected by the Bosporus Strait, forming one of the continental boundaries between Europe and Asia.

We worked closely with Ammar Kiliç from the Sociology Department of Namik Kemel University in Tekirdağ. Ammar introduced us to many small communities scattered through the Süleymanpaşa district, an important area of extensive and varied agricultural production and export.

As is the case wherever we have photographed, there is the increasing domination over agricultural production and rural economies by international agribusiness. Even though a site might be relatively small in scale, its agricultural production is fundamentally controlled by what is, in essence, an agropoly.  Nonetheless, we saw examples of more progressive ventures, including a farmer working with specialists to explore new strains of extreme weather-resistant cereal crops in recognition of the effects of climate change. And a woman who has returned to her family’s land and is attempting to develop an organic and regenerative approach to farming.