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›the coming and going of the seasons – the
constant intrusions of foxes and other vermin,
the day to day struggle to keep farms,
abattoirs and related agricultural businesses
alive – were managing to maintain a way of
life in the face of a seemingly indifferent or
even hostile urban class. Steele-Perkins had to
maintain an even hand, aware that a
photographer’s presence at a ‘lamping’ session
or hunt could easily be taken as a hostile
intrusion. ‘I just had to build a relationship
with these people’, says Steele-Perkins.N
orthern Exposures depicts all
who make their lives in this
area without treating any of
them differently; 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. In these ‘ex-urban’
communities, developed in the middle of
fields and woods, the people whose work
was related to the mines – who hadn’t an
agricultural reason to be there – developed
their own relationship with nature. Perhaps
this is one of the abiding cultural markers of
the north of England: the unique way that the
working people of the region have connected
with the countryside that surrounds the
towns and villages where they live.
Northern Exposures is a classic work of
British documentary because Steele-Perkins,
a photographer for whom poetry is an