A.R.L

About

Anthology of Rural Life is an ongoing photographic project
by Oliver Udy and Colin Robins.

Contact us:

oliver.udy (at) falmouth.ac.uk
colin.robins (at) plymouth.ac.uk

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Colin Robins and Oliver Udy are British documentary photographers based in Cornwall. Both are academics teaching Photography, as well as practitioners working individually within Photography and Publishing.  Colin and Oli have been collaborating on the Anthology of Rural Life project for over ten years. Their shared interest in quiet documentary practice has evolved over time with a collaboration that sheds light on the shifting nature of life in diverse European rural areas. So far, their work has taken them to Finland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Turkey as well as different studies in areas of the UK.

Farming on the Lizard

Colin Robins + Oliver Udy

(Text from the 2024 Exhibition at Kestle Barton)

In our conversations with numerous farmers on the Lizard, there are clearly shared narratives with commentaries heard in other European sites. These include the capacity to sustain economic viability in respect to complex challenges emerging from economics, legislation, technologies, and climate change. There is also either a pragmatic embrace of contemporary multi-national agri-business models, or a scepticism born from the necessity of the vast capital outlay and loss of autonomy associated with them. Related to this is the concomitant increase in the size and scale of individual farms. We also see emerging patterns of diversification as within many of the other farming communities where we’ve worked. In the Lizard these are clearly manifest in initiatives such as the growth of regenerative and organic modes of farming, shifts from crop production to horticulture and in the subsidising of farming through tourism and farm shops. Significantly we encountered migrant workers highly embedded within the rural economy; central Europeans (Poles, Lithuanians, and Latvians) work the fields of the Lizard as Ukrainians do in Poland and people from Türkmenistan in Turkey.

We asked numerous families how they foresaw the next ten years of farming on the Lizard and the responses were intriguingly diverse. Speculations on whether the land will continue to be agriculturally productive or move further towards widespread adoption of governmentally driven environmental schemes were voiced. There is an uncertainty in the possibility of seeing, as someone put it, ‘trees planted where crops once thrived, land ‘rewilded’ where animals used to graze’. Others mentioned that they saw the future in terms of a transition towards the ‘natural potential’ of the land to generate profitability, with a wider range of crops in the rotation and a higher focus on soil management. A steadfast belief that smaller family run farms will ‘weather the storm’ runs parallel with the potential increased involvement of large organisations, such as the National Trust, Natural England and Cornwall Wildlife Trust. Whilst everyone acknowledged the numerous problems facing contemporary farming, the overwhelming responses we received were optimistic in tone, even when contradictory in viewpoint.

What has been clear to us, however, is the profound dedication felt by people to the land as well as to the region itself. People told us that their families have been on the same farms for five, six or even more generations, and networks of relationships and connections fostered through generations of inter-family marriages stretch web-like across the peninsula.



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Anthology of Rural Life

Martin Barnes

(Essay from A.R.L Vol 1 Book)

Anthology of Rural Life (A.R.L) represents over ten years’ insightful collaboration It is the result of a fruitful partnership, not only between two like-minded British photographers but also with the people and places that appear in these quietly probing photographs. The images depict rural communities and locations from the UK and within Europe, including Finland, Italy, and Poland. In their contemplative stillness they measure moments that seems caught between gradual change and rapid development; selfhood and society; tradition and modernity; or regional specificity and global connection.

Robins and Udy’s project overlaps with disciplines of photographic anthropology cultural geography and rural sociology. Their work can be situated more specifically within a distinguished history of comparable photographic projects that combine the visual language of artistic practice with the remit of an investigative survey. They describe what they do as ‘gently mapping’ a place and its inhabitants. The result avoids agrarian romanticism and rural heroism. Rather, it provides an understated descriptive emphasis on individuals and specific sites. And the photographs are filled with as much character and presence as the subjects they depict. The significance and importance of the anthology has gathered as its volume and scope has gradually increased. But despite its geographical range and ambition, the project remains fittingly humble, human and intimate – the opposite of the disembodied, encyclopaedic aims of Google Earth. A.R.L is instead an immersive, tangential, attuned and rewarding exercise in slow looking.

Alongside the poetic potential of photography, the medium has been used throughout its history as a method of taxonomy: a seemingly empirical device for cataloguing classification and comparison. To this end, various recording and survey movement flourished during the 19th and early 20th centuries. These were often motivated by a desire to promote national identity, or to preserve for the future images of places people or traditions under threat. Some gained government backing and aimed to be comprehensive. Others were created by groups of enthusiastic amateurs or by individuals with a dedication to the cause.

The rise of photography in Britain and France coincided with radical changes in the visual appearance of each nation, alongside unprecedented upheavals in rural life. Key factors included the rapid expansion of rail networks, the unprecedented construction of factories, harbours and houses, and the dominance of mechanized farming over traditional labour. There was little interest from the British government to mobilize photographers under a centralized project to record the changes. By contrast the French government’s Historic Monuments Commission was quick to establish the Mission Héliographique, employing in 1851 five of their best photographers to document the nation’s historical and contemporary architectural achievements.¹  British photographers, devoid of government agendas, focussed instead on romantic locations. Favoured subjects included ruined abbeys and castles, manor houses, village churches, gnarled trees, old farmyards, waterfalls and mountainous landscapes. On the rarer occasions when people were depicted, the emphasis was on rural peasantry or friends and family of the photographers acting as such.

Among this group were the British inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77), as well as figures such as Calvert Richard Jones (1804-77), Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-94), Francis Bedford (1815-94), Roger Fenton (1819-69) and Francis Frith (1822-98). Their works stand at a junction between their antiquarian and artistic aspirations and the commercial possibilities of photography that were exploited from the 1860s onwards. Frith transitioned to the forefront of the commercial topographical endeavour, his company becoming synonymous with accessible travel photography. He hired others to make views of popular tourist sites in England and abroad and began marketing the ‘Universal Series’ in 1864. These views were pitched at a market that would later adopt the postcard as the ideal format for its needs.

Frith & Co’s. operation contrasts with other projects that emerged in the second half of the 19th century: some prioritized architectural preservation and others focussed on socially engaged portraiture. Their success was measured on the balance of descriptive value with aesthetic appeal. The culmination of the photographic survey in  19th century Britain was the formation of the National Photographic Record Association (NPRA) in 1897 by Sir Benjamin Stone (1838-1914). The NPRA archive consists of over 5,000 prints, submitted by various camera club members to a specified formula.² It is an ambitious county-by-county inventory, showing predominantly architecture, but also social events, local festivals, ceremonies and customs. A parallel desire to capture vanishing tradition and its locations – though in aural rather than visual form – occurred with the activities of Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), a collector of folk music and dance. Sharp forensically notated English folk song in the early years of the 20th century – not primarily for nostalgic reasons but with an interest in its practical use, for present and for future. His work is a form of field recording on paper before technology advanced enough to allow the easy capture of sound. Sharp’s work led to the foundation of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which flourishes to this day.³ For him, the creative outpourings of what he described as ‘common people’ usually from rural and other working communities, existed not in a state of stasis, but in constant transformation.

Although often concerned with the working classes, such surveys were generated largely by the concerns of the economic and political elite and were often supplied to educational and cultural institutions. Such underlying structures point to anxiety over shifts in identity: not simply a conservative yearning for fixing unstable traditions, but also as a way of assessing values of the past to incorporate them in the modern age. As one of the favoured tools of the survey movement, the photographic medium itself highlights this creative collision of tradition and modernity. Photographic survey images can be studied and appreciated today from many angles including material culture, history, politics, anthropology, folk archives and art. The present imperative of our own societal upheavals suggest parallels with the motivations – the anxieties and aspirations of nations – that lie behind the recording projects of the past.

Alongside the lineage of survey projects that are concerned with environments, Robins’ and Udy’s A.R.L can be placed within a long tradition of environmental portraiture. Well-known examples include John Thomson’s (1837-1921) publication Street Life in London (1876-77), a survey of the East End London poor; and Thomas Annan’s (1829-87) The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow (1868-1877) which maps the slums. Less well-known are the Russian Types by William Carrick (1827-78). His portraits depict working people with the tools of their professions, like an 1860s precursor of Irving Penn’s (1917-2009) famous Small Trades of the 1950s. In these works, the conventions of the portrait studio are mobilized but applied outside of its confines – with backcloths or neutral backgrounds, and the dignified pose of sitters, fully cognisant of the presence of the camera and photographer, usually returning their gaze. Other touchstones for Robins and Udy are the works of August Sander (1876-1964) and Paul Stand (1890–1976).

Sander tried to create a democratic atlas of the German people, publishing a small selection of sixty images from his larger project as Antlitz der Zeit (Face of our Time) in 1929. The images were classified in seven sections: ‘The Farmer’, ‘The Skilled Tradesman’, ‘Woman’, ‘Classes and Professions’, ‘The Artists’, ‘The City’, and ‘The Last People’ (which included the homeless, the disabled, the sick and even the dead). Sander’s cast of characters are defined by their integrated role or position in society: from the philosopher to the baker, the unemployed to the soldier. As in Robins and Udy’s project, Sander’s figures are often depicted with the accoutrements, and in the typical dress, of their professions. Despite what now seems an overly ambitious or simplifying attempt to organize a fluid society, Sander’s images are nevertheless characterized by a sense of respect and a humanizing engagement with his sitters.

Strand similarly dedicated his life to exploring the social and artistic power of photography, pioneering many of the styles and ideas that still concern photographers today. He was able to satisfy his desire to reach larger audiences by presenting his fine prints in the form of books. From 1945 until the end of his life, he devoted himself to collaborating with writers on publications which acted as extended portraits of places and the people who lived there. He travelled in the US, Europe and Africa, immersing himself for months within communities. The most representative of these books are Un Paese (1955), which examines life in the small Italian town of Luzzara, and Tir a’Mhurain: Outer Hebrides (1962), an elegiac portrait of existence on Scottish islands. The choice of places was politically motivated for he selected locations with strong socialist sympathies where regional identity was being impacted by global modernity. He often framed figures on the dark thresholds of doorways, a visual device used by Robins and Udy in their project which contains many creative and conceptual echoes of Strand’s work.

The word ‘anthology’ is more usually associated with selections of poetry by different authors collected around a common theme. It is a fitting choice for the title of Robins and Udy’s project. The authors of this anthology, however, share a visual style and approach to the degree that it is deliberately not possible to detect individual authorship. The book intersperses black and white portraiture and colour landscapes in a way that gives balance to each. This is a hallmark of the equilibrium that is brought to the project by both photographers. Their portraits show the contemporary trappings of clothing and settings, but the expressions on the dignified faces are timeless. The landscapes demonstrate how they are attuned to visual signals in rural locations that reveal shifts within social as well as physical terrain. The factual and emotional weight of A.R.L earns its place alongside its significant predecessors and brings the conditions it exposes into the consciousness of the present.

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1. Édouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, and Auguste Mestral.

2. Print sizes and captions were standardized, and the preferred printing technique was platinum, prized for its stability and longevity. On completion, the NPRA archive was lodged at the British Museum before its transfer to the V&A in 2000.

3. See Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (2010) p.63-71




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Reflecting the Rural

David Chandler

“What emerges from these compelling photographs, beyond the simple force of character that is in itself often so disarming, is that each figure embodies an individual narrative, and a trace of local history, that builds over the images into a cross-section and a collective portrait of a new rural society."



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Anthology of Rural Life

Dr Menelaos Gkartzios

There is not one rural Europe; and were we to agree on one thing about the European countryside, it would be that it is changing fast – even when no one notices. Sometimes no one notices. From agriculture-dominated landscapes to gentrified villages with holiday home rentals, and from modern windfarms to stone-houses and rustic rural pubs, rural Europe is a collection of lived experiences, a mosaic of biographies, of ambition, of memory. We will agree that all places are unique, all places mean different things to different people, but when it comes to the countryside, we tend to think of it as the binary opposite of the city – as if it is the city that dictates everything that the countryside is and is not. The diversity of rural areas, their own and unique trajectories of development – and of stagnation sometimes – however, is the reality of our contemporary countrysides. Progressive and parochial, co-dependent and proud, rural areas are part of a globalised world that is increasingly interested in them, but one that does not always aim to meet them on their own terms.


The Anthology of Rural Life does exactly that. It evidences some of this differentiation by documenting rural places, documenting rural lives. Like rural researchers, Oliver Udy and Colin Robins co-create a collection of all things that ‘make’ rural places, both visible and invisible, both material and experiential. Portraits of people and animals, landscapes, practices and experiences of the everyday. This is rural life – where people live, what jobs they do, how they spend their free time. Networks, products, houses, desires. These are all rural too. Their Anthology offers a nuanced representation of rural Europe where authenticity and originality are not challenged, they are simply irrelevant. Their imagery is characterised by multiple, overlapping and even contradicting rurals – and rightly so. Sometimes coloured, sometimes black and white, the countryside is unpacked here in more than visual ways; these photographs have smells, have sounds, they are haptic. They are full of dreams, sometimes of fears too.


The Anthology of Rural Life has developed patiently over time, it has come into being as a ‘project’ naturally. Like everything with time, it matures and develops into a knowledge helix. It is the result of friendship, of love of rural places, of the need to make art. The photographers travel occasionally, spend time in the communities, meet people, build relationships. The Anthology of Rural Life is a visual textbook. It is a rural sociology, aiming to conform and contradict our own perceptions and imaginations about the countryside: idyllic, boring, beautiful, natural, deprived. It is everything that you will mirror onto it.