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B+Wa project about the English countryside,
noticing that there was little in the British
photographic canon that concentrated on
the theme. What started as one visit of a
couple of weeks turned into a four-year
project; in his words, ‘trying to squeeze
something out of it’. From this perspective
Northern Exposures becomes an elegy to
the way life is lived when people engage
with nature through necessity or choice.
At the time Steele-Perkins was
photographing, the fox hunting ban had
recently become law and the BSE (Mad Cow
Disease) epidemic was a recent memory.
Whole communities of farmers and others
whose lives had been inextricably linked to
‘Farmers and landowners,
hunt masters and ferreters,
pigeon fanciers, dog racers and
the trainers of birds of prey are
portrayed without favour
or political slant.’
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