Biographie
After studying literature and ethnology in England and Canada, Justin Partyka started a long-term project on the agricultural communities in the East of England. This work was first shown in the exhibition “A Picture of Britain” organized by the Tate Gallery (London) in 2005. Since then the project continues and has been the subject of one-man exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich (2009) and at the gallery Eleven Spitafields in London (2010). A book and an installation at the Museum of English Rural Life are in preparation.
Présentation
These photographs were made between 2001 and 2008 in the East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, one of the most rural areas of England. They tell the story of what is left of the region’s agrarian community – the small-time farmers who continue to work the fields because it is the only way of life that they know. Justin Partyka spent many hours in the fields, patiently watching how man and the landscape intimately shape each other. Occasionally he is offered a glimpse into the mystery of this ancient relationship. It is a fleeting moment - he presses his shutter.