Picturing
Picturing
real livesnot image
How do you get over the real story of farmers lives to
the general public? Tom Morley thinks he has an answer,
as he explained to David Cousins
THE man on the top deck of the Clapham omnibus (as members of the public used to be referred to), is mightily confused about British farmers. Judging by the stories he reads in his newspaper and on the TV news, the southern and eastern half of us are rapacious, Range Rover-driving barley barons, ripping up hedgerows and ordering timid walkers off our land.
The western and northern half, meanwhile, are Worzel Gum-midge types, scratching a sad living with half a dozen cows on a muddy hillside without the benefit of education, profit or decent dress sense.
Either of these sound like you? No of course not. But the fact that these stereotypes persist when the reality is so different is a classic 21st century victory of image over substance. But how do you explain what the lives of farmers are really like to a public largely reliant on the tabloid press for its information?
* Lot of patience
With a camera, a notebook and a lot of patience, says Tom Morley. Tom comes from a classic farming background – 105ha (260-acre) family arable farm near Pakenham in Suffolk, HND in agriculture at Shuttleworth College. He farmed in his own right in Devon but then realised there wasnt really a decent living to be had on the relatively small farm he was able to afford. Which is where the camera comes in.
"Id never picked up a camera before in my life," he says. "But I went on a photography course and decided that I wanted to make social documentaries. I worked for local papers then did some music photography, but after farming that seemed a very pretentious, shallow industry."
* Hard-hitting
Still in search of more hard-hitting subject matter, he went with a charity called Medical Support in Romania to document hospitals in NW Transylvania and prisoners in Bucharest.
While the nature of the photographs meant they only found their way into a limited number of publications, they confirmed the power of this type of serious photo-journalism to alter the publics perception of a particular group of people.
Which is how he came full-circle back to farming. For he came to hear of a scheme called the National Farming Documentation Project (NFDP), which aimed to create awareness of the plight of UK livestock farmers.
"UK farming has never been well-documented socially, though it was done well in the US in the 1930s," he points out. "Though foot-and-mouth is still a big topic among urban people, farmers themselves have become very disengaged from the public. Theres a process of withdrawal going on, particularly among livestock farmers."
The aim of Tom Morley and other photographers working for the NFDP is simple, yet difficult; to live with farmers and their families for days at a time and photograph all aspects of their life – not just the farming itself but family life too.
The point of the exercise isnt to present pretty pictures of farming either; its simply to show what farmers lives are really like and to give the public a more rounded view of them than the one they currently receive from the popular press.
How will these pictures and words reach the public? In a variety of ways, says Tom. "We hope that some of them will appear as photo features in the more thoughtful magazines, some will form the basis of TV documentaries, some be gathered into books and some feature in photographic exhibitions."
Toms first project is documenting the life of a Suffolk sheep and suckler farmer. His next will chart the lives of a group of 15 crofters in Sutherland; he plans to visit them on and off for two or three years and probably work on the farms. They were understandably sceptical at first, but Toms previous life as a farmer definitely helped to reassure them as to his good intentions. "They live a bloody hard life and they are very strong personalities," he says. "But theyre very isolated and are becoming a somewhat endangered species."
* Big sheep farm
His second and third projects will involve documenting a farm in Devon and big sheep farm in the Yorkshire Dales. But he is on the lookout for other farms as well, in particular a largish cattle farm in Northumberland and a farm in the Brecon Beacons, whether affected by F&M or not.
"I obviously want characters but the main thing is that the family have to be prepared for me to live with them for some while and show me every aspect of their lives – even mundane things like taking the kids to school."
Tom Morley can be contacted on (07050-136030) or
tmorley@freebie.net. Examples of the work of Littoral (of which the NFDP is part) can be seen on www.littoral.org.uk/programme_arts.htm
Examples of some of Tom Morleys recent photographs. He wants to document the day-to-day realities of farmers lives.