Friday 21st May 2021
9:30 am – 17:30 pm

The Rural Gaze considered, explored, debated and reviewed how photographers and photography practice develops and responds to the rural.

In January 2020 GRAIN Projects commissioned acclaimed, established and emerging photographers and artists to make new work in collaboration with and in response to rural communities and locations. In the new bodies of work the photographers explore issues of rural life, environments, economics, politics, land use, community and cultural identity against a backdrop of post Brexit agriculture, the global climate emergency and the Covid 19 pandemic.

The projects range from the poetic, documentary, conceptual and archival and demonstrate a range of different approaches to photography about the rural that is not dominated by the picturesque, pastoral or romantic but by important new voices that show the complexities, connections and diversity of the rural landscape, people and places in a state of significant change and dramatic shifts in agriculture and rural communities. The work also remarks on the city and the countryside and shows our essential and integral relationship with the land and the rural.

The artists and photographers are Alannah Cooper, Emily Graham, Guy Martin, Leah Gordon, Marco Kesseler, Matthew Broadhead, Murray Ballard, Navi Kaur, Oliver Udy and Colin Robins, Polly Braden and Sam Laughlin. They were joined by academics and writers Camilla Brown and Mark Durden who facilitated the symposium.

A new hard back publication, to be released this summer, will feature all the projects along with new writing by Camilla Brown and Mark Durden.

The Rural Gaze Symposium, Recording – £5.00 , purchase via the Paypal button below:

Image Credit: Around the Stump (c) Murray Ballard