Life on 40 farms through a photographer's eye
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Life on 40 farms through a photographer's eye
This week: What it's like to photograph 40 Cumbrian farms, 15 years of painting the same barbershop, Tate Liverpool's new look and a 70s play that resonates in post-Brexit UK
‘Timeless’ would be an apt word to describe Amy Bateman’s photographs of Cumbrian farms - a herd of sheep blocking the way like a gang of sullen teenagers on a street corner, the yellow lights of a cattle shed spilling out into a cobbled courtyard, patchwork quilts of landscape taken by drone. Yet that would only tell part of the story.
In capturing life on 40 of the region’s 5,000-plus farm holdings, her work is an account of transformation, of a desire to change and modernise, of resilience and a deep connection to the land.
Bateman is the grand-daughter of a farmer as well as the wife of one - although not a ‘farmer’s wife’, an important distinction that she takes time to point out. This, and her background as an award-winning landscape photographer, gives her a special relationship with her subject an outsider would lack. Her book - and the accompanying exhibition currently showing at Windermere Jetty Museum - combines her atmospheric images with interviews. Both elements show the huge diversity of Cumbria’s agricultural industry, from its wide range of landscapes including hills and the coastline to the types of farming being carried out.
Her audience tends to be split into two - farmers interested in learning from their peers and people who encounter the region’s farms in a more casual way, perhaps walking its trails or eating its meat.
‘We’d have a cup of tea and I’d have my dictaphone running and get their story’
‘Cumbria is an incredibly diverse landscape so I was able to cover a massive range of farms relevant to any other farmer in the country,’ says Bateman. ‘I would spend a day with them. We’d have a cup of tea and I’d have my dictaphone running and get their story.
‘I never really know what I’m looking for when doing photography. I’d have an idea of the theme before I went - it might be a young farmer, an old farmer, a farming family, diversification - and later I’d think “I want to get that shot to tell that part of the story”.’
Many of the farms have never been pictured by a professional photographer before and Bateman was drawn by the chance to take pictures of places where people wouldn’t usually be granted access, such as the inside of barns or areas of the land given over to biodiversity schemes
She is keen for people to better understand where their food is coming from and the impact their choices have on farming and the environment. She was keen to tell positive stories of farmers exploring new ideas and adapting to challenges.
‘I have 900 acres nobody has experienced with a photographer’s eye’
Bateman too has seen a lot of change in recent years. Originally from Yorkshire, where she grew up in Menworth Hill, near Harrogate, she moved to Cumbria 20 years ago and set up a physiotherapy business. But, finding this work was eating up time she wanted to spend with her three daughters, she gave it up to raise them and help her husband run their 900-acre livestock farm just outside Kendal. Night school classes and some major photography gongs later, Bateman decided to turn her hobby into a profession in 2019 and now works on a mixture of commissions and personal projects.
Forty Farms has brought with it a number of surprises, not least the fan mail Bateman receives on an almost weekly basis, including handwritten letters and cards saying how much their senders have been touched by the book.
‘I feel privileged to photograph these places and listen to these stories,’ she says. ‘On our own farm I have 900 acres nobody has experienced with a photographer’s eye so I’m able to create some quite unique images.’
Forty Farms is at Windermere Jetty Museum until June 4. Tickets are £9 adults (concs available) and last for 12 months. You can buy the book, priced £29.90, from Amy Bateman’s website.
This week we’re also buzzing about…
Hurvin Anderson - Salon Paintings: Hurvin Anderson has spent 15 years depicting the same barber’s shop in different ways, see above, from initial studio drawings in 2006 to his final painting begun in 2022. Salon Paintings, opening at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield tomorrow, presents the most comprehensive presentation of his Barbershop series yet and considers his experimentation with tensions in modern painting alongside political works such as Is it OK to be Black? 2015. Book here.
No Pay? No Way!: Theatre Twitter has been raving about the Royal Exchange in Manchester’s new production of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s 1974 play and quite how relevant it remains today. This new translation by Australian Marieke Hardy, about housewives revolting over food prices by stealing from the supermarket, won a five-star review from the Stage: ‘Delightfully silly and deadly serious’ (£). The Guardian gave it a more cautious three stars but concluded ‘it speaks to now, and how’. Catch it until June 10. Book here.
Tate Liverpool’s transformation: The gallery has revealed preliminary designs for its renovations that it says will ‘welcome visitors into a brand new museum environment for the 21st century’. As often at this stage, it’s a bit hard to tell what the end result will look like - or how it will feel to walk through and experience - but the description of a new ground floor Art Hall and events space ‘opened up to admit sunlight and views across the historic dock’ and double-height galleries that will allow massive works of art to be displayed sound promising.
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Have a great week,
Laura