Close to Home: Rural Photographs from Norfolk and Suffolk by Justin Partyka

Osborne Samuel are hosting an online exhibition of Close to Home with Artsy from 30th January - 24th February. Close to Home includes work from the series: 'Field Work', 'My Friend Eric (and Sons)', 'Summer Days in the Valley', 'Some Trees', 'Not Exactly Nature Writing' and 'Sky', covering ten years of Partyka's work. 

Click here to view the online exhibition

Field Work looks at the remnants of the old agrarian way of life in East Anglia. The photographs show a rural world that is unknown to many—a place where traditional methods and knowledge are still very much depended upon, and where the past continues to exist in the present. I have spent many hours in the fields while the farmers work, patiently watching  how man and the land intimately shape each other. 

My Friend Eric (and Sons) emerged out of the Field Work series and tells the story of the Norfolk farm of Eric Wortley and his twin sons Peter and Stephen. I first met the Wortleys in 2003. Eric was 94 years of age and his days of working the land were coming to an end. He mostly tended the house while the sons ploughed, sowed and harvested the fields. They generously welcomed me into their world and I became their friend. I witnessed a profound rural authenticity in the Wortley family. Farming is the only way of life that they know. 

Summer Days in the Valley comes from my exploration of the winding path of the river Stour. This is “Constable Country” the heart of English landscape art. But I set out to find my own way of seeing this bucolic river valley. The photographs largely reject the celebrated grand vistas and offer an alternative view of this landscape. They bring attention to the particular, the peculiar, and the poetic—the hidden places and scenes that are so often overlooked.

Some Trees is a series of photographs that has its origins in my daily walks in the country. Even the most simple of trees can have a profound place in the landscape. The photographs reveal the subtle ways that the presence of a tree changes with the light and the passing of time.

Not Exactly Nature Writing is a series of photographs made in the local landscape of the celebrated nature writer Roger Deakin (1943-2006) who lived at Walnut Tree Farm on the edge of Mellis common, Suffolk for almost forty years. The photographs begin at Walnut Tree Farm, where I visited in November 2006 shortly after the writer’s death. They offer a glimpse at the home that Deakin built and some of the objects from his daily life that were scattered around the garden and meadows. Six years later I began returning to Mellis, exploring the common and its surrounding fields and tracks, such as Cowpasture Lane. These photographs are a search to try and discover what had attracted Roger Deakin to this little patch of Suffolk. 

Sky has nothing to do with previous skyscapes in photography and painting: the “Equivalents” of Alfred Stieglitz, William Eggleston’s At Zenith, or even John Constable’s cloud studies. Instead it’s about taking on Norfolk’s “big sky country” so completely that it rejects the dominance of the horizon—a feature that is so cliché in mainstream Norfolk photography. This is just one picture from the trilogy series Field, Wood, Sky. These photographs have been made over the past five years in a little corner of the county, where on a summer’s evening I’ve seen the most exquisite light. 

For more information visit http://www.osbornesamuel.com/ or email [email protected]