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Mine fields
Northern Exposures began five years ago as part of a project on Durham’s former coalfields instigated by Newcastle’s Side Gallery and it has been continually added to in recent years whenever the opportunity arose for its author, Chris Steele-Perkins, to drive back to the North East. Although he grew up at the other end of the country, his career as a photographer began in the North East after his time at Newcastle University: his first solo exhibition documented Newcastle’s annual fair, the Hoppings, where seemingly dozens of travelling fairs congregate on the city’s Town Moor during July race week, the highlight of which is the Northumberland Plate, commonly known as the ‘Miners’ Derby’. The mining villages of the North East grew up along roads through farmland and open country; when Britain had a mining industry the cottages and the land were owned by the then National Coal Board. Although the mines are no more, Steele-Perkins was struck by the continuing relationship between the locals and the land, and in particular their animals. Whether these be horses and hounds, racing pigeons, hunting dogs, ferrets and polecats. He describes his intention as wanting, “to document these ways, and rituals of a life lived in the open, under the sky,” and the images as, “a partial record, and a personal exploration, which serves as both eulogy and elegy.” He is determined that they not be seen in a sentimental light, but as an objective document of what remains, and what is changed and lost. Changing attitudes are summarised by the final image in the book: a bleak moorlandscape where, in the foreground by the side of a cross-Pennine road, stands a dumped dishwasher. But most of his images are upbeat and affectionate while, at the same time, recording ways of life that seem ultimately destined to fizzle out, inevitably snuffed by urbanisation, legislation and social change. As Steele-Perkins concludes: “In the end the guardians of the countryside are those who live off it. It is they who know it best and understand that for all its damaged beauty it is what remains to us of Eden.”
Northern Exposures, by Chris Steele-Perkins, is published by Northumbria University Press at £15.00,
ISBN 978-1-904794-20-2.
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