Remnants of the Grain Tower, February 2019 – When my parents bought the farm 40 years ago, they decided to go into free range egg production. They purchased 1000 Isa Brown hens, and built a 20ft grain tower to accommodate the mass amount of grain for the hens. The egg business did not last long as there was very little profit. Artemis and my Mother, 2019 – I try not to stage my portraits, they both appeared walking out of the dark workshop on a summer’s day. I adore this portrait, yet it haunts me. Easter Rabbit, 2019 – When anything dies on the farm, it’s often waiting for me in the porch for me to photograph. My family have become used to my desire to photograph animals that have passed, there is something beautiful about their stillness. I like to think by photographing these animals, it is like a homage to its life, like I am preserving the animal forever. Often my friends will send me photographs of dead animals that they find on their walks.
I am drawn to photograph ephemeral moments which cross my path. From a young age I have been obsessed with death; it is fascinatingly beautiful yet I am scared of it.
I use photography as a way of exploring death and nature’s lifecycles. Susan Sontag once said “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
All of my photographs are a moment of death. Growing up on a farm is like being part of a registration office – witnessing daily births, marriages of nature and, ultimately, mortality, all against the changing backdrop of seasons.
These works are all captured from my home, a farm in a tiny hamlet in Staffordshire. Some of these images are taken from my book ‘Peacocks Cry’ which was published by Out of Place Books at the start of 2020, and some are more recent, taken during the pandemic as I aimlessly wander the farm, wondering when this will all end.
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I am a British photographer and educator, living in rural Staffordshire.
amberbanksbrumby.co.uk / instagram.com/cilla_bobby / outofplacebooks.com/peacocks-cry