British photographer Joanne Coates has spent years interrogating the British class system and scraping aside the fuzzy-eyed myths that surround rural life in this country. In her new series The Lie of the Land, she unravels the social histories of the countryside in the northeast of England by collaborating with 12 rural working class women in agriculture.
Coates’ work challenges the erasure of gender and working class histories in the UK – in fact, the photographer still works on a farm herself. “We didn’t have access to photography at GCSE, so I didn’t have the understanding of what it could be. It wasn’t something I knew people did as a job,” she tells VICE, recalling her later introduction to the medium.
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While early pictures documented life around her in place of a diary, more recent projects continue to engage with the personal. In North Sea Swells she explored the fishing industry on account of her grandad’s occupation, while she began to turn her gaze on the role of women in agriculture with Daughters of the Soil. When Coates won the Jerwood/Photoworks 4 award The Lie of the Land was commissioned as part of the prize, and she began developing the ideas from the latter. As the project launches at an exhibition in London later this month, she speaks to VICE below.
VICE: How did the project begin?
Joanne Coates: Before this, in Daughters of the Soil, I explored gender and agriculture. All of my work looks at class, but I hadn’t had a project where I could explore it in a really freeing way. I started looking at land ownership – who gets it, who gets to farm, and who doesn’t. That made me research class in terms of rural space. I also realised there wasn’t a huge amount of working class women shown in the history of photography.
How did your own relationship with class and rurality then shape it?
I grew up in the countryside, which I felt I had to leave: when there’s nowhere you can afford to live, how do you stay? When I was studying, my work came back to the countryside and rural space. It’s that personal history and feeling that that story, of working classes and rurality, hasn’t been told. Now I live in the countryside again and it’s seen as somewhere to move to, to be creative, but if you’re working class and from here, you can’t afford that lifestyle. I found that duality interesting, the complexities of class in the countryside.
Beyond the personal, what were your influences?
Nathalie Olah. She doesn’t necessarily talk about the countryside, but she talks about that experience of people in the 90s feeling they could escape their class, and it being a false illusion. Gideon Koppel’s Sleep Furiously: It’s this really beautiful film touching on change – he grew up in this Welsh mining town and had come back. The end scene, in an abandoned farmhouse, really sits with me. That message of that lifestyle dying, then that commodification of the rural, and what that means for everyday experiences there.
You collaborated with 12 women who identify as working class, and who live and work in agricultural settings. How were you introduced?
I’d done an open call on social media, then local press. I still do a farm labourer job, and some of the women I work with were like, “you haven’t asked me?” That was a real defining moment. We wouldn’t have said we’re talking about class [at work], but we’ll talk about motherhood, bills, etc. So half the women came from my work. It made working together interesting, as they could be blunt about the process.
Can you speak on the relationship between photographer and subject in your work?
Photography takes, quite often, and I wanted to look at everyone’s experiences. I asked what it meant to be who they are and what they see themselves as, regardless of work. That informed the portraits and how we made them. Class is so complicated, everyone has a different experience, so just talking, listening, walking was important. It’s separate from the photography, but it’s important for my understanding and broadening it. Later, I set up the camera and said “let’s photograph each other”, but a lot of them were uncomfortable. I thought it’d be enjoyable, so I was surprised, but especially with a film camera, you’re participating in labour. We don’t think of it as labour, but you’re asking them to do that.
And how did you arrive at the title, Lie of the Land?
I’m in the Northern Dales – rolling hills, little stone cottages – but you’re more likely to live in a pebbledash house or on a council estate. That was one element, the way the land looks and the way we perceive the countryside as beautiful, a place for the middle class. David Cameron did this when he pushed the pastoral vision of the countryside, but that’s not the reality. Also, the power structures of the land. Some places I photographed are owned by the wealthiest people in the UK, and at one point it would have been a feudal system. Two of the Dales I’ve worked across still have that, with tenant farmers and villages owned entirely by one person, but people don’t think that exists anymore. This erasure of the working class rural experience doesn’t make sense to me – so many of the jobs are labouring work.
Jerwood/Photworks Awards 4, featuring new commissions by Heather Agyepong and Joanne Coates, is now on at Jerwood Arts till 10th December 2022.
