Colin Robins & Oliver Udy 

Anthology of Rural Life: Redruth Photographs

 

10 - 24 May, Friday & Saturday, 11am-5pm (or by appointment)

Private View : Friday 9 May, 7pm-9pm. All Welcome

 

The Redruth Photographs features a new series of portraits made in Redruth. The work has been created and curated by Colin Robins and Oliver Udy as part of their Anthology of Rural Life project.

 

The Anthology of Rural Life is a long-term photographic project that reflects shifting economic, social and cultural forces occurring in diverse European contexts. 

 

Robins and Udy’s project overlap with disciplines of photographic anthropology, cultural geography and rural sociology. Their work can be situated more specifically within a distinguished history of comparable photographic projects that combine the visual language of artistic practice with the remit of an investigative survey.

 

They describe what they do as ‘gently mapping’ a place and its inhabitants. The result avoids agrarian romanticism and rural heroism. Rather, it provides an understated, descriptive emphasis on individuals and specific sites. 

 

The photographs in this exhibition are selected from a larger body of work produced to complement a similar series made in the town a generation ago in 1999 and shown in Cornish Vernacular Photography Studies 1940 / 1990 at AH in 2022. They present a wide cross-section of people who are either living in the community or were passing through. The photographs include people who were born and who chose to remain, as well as individuals who have, for different reasons, decide to locate here. 

 

The project was developed in partnership with Auction House Gallery and Back Lane West as part of the ABC Project alongside CMR, and supported by Plymouth University, Falmouth University, Cornwall Council’s Library and Archive Services and Redruth Town Council.

 

The photographs will be archived at Kresen Kernow as a social and historical document.

 

Colin Robins and Oliver Udy are British documentary photographers based in Cornwall. Both are academics teaching Photography, as well as practitioners working individually within Photography and Publishing.  Colin and Oli have been collaborating on the Anthology of Rural Life project for over ten years. Their shared interest in quiet documentary practice has evolved over time with a collaboration that sheds light on the shifting nature of life in diverse European areas. So far, their work has taken them to Finland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Portugal as well as different studies in areas of the UK.