Justin Partyka

‘The East Anglians’, a major new exhibition of fifty-eight photographs by Justin Partyka opens at the Sainsbury Centre for Visuals Arts, University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich on Tuesday, 29 September, and runs until 13 December.

‘The East Anglians’ features a body of work by Partyka which has resulted from a personal project by the artist, exploring rural life in his home region. The exhibition reveals one of the last vestiges of East Anglia’s deep-rooted agrarian community and provides opportunity to reflect on this in a global context.

‘It is under the melancholy monochrome light of a still winter’s day that the agrarian landscape of East Anglia best reveals it timelessness. This is when I prefer to walk the small fields of the farms: crunching across an unploughed stubble, or sidestepping my way through a crop of leeks or Brussels sprouts. As if I was entering a secret door, I push myself backwards through the boundary hedgerow of ash, willow, and hawthorn. Emerging out on the other side, I find myself standing on the remains of an old drove that at one time accessed an isolated farmstead now long since vanished. In the distance, wind breaks of poplar and oak stand like skeletal ghosts — their silhouettes serving as reminders of the past men and women who once laboured these soils’ — Justin Partyka.

Partyka began photographing in rural East Anglia in 2001. His project has taken him across the Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire where he has discovered a largely forgotten rural world.

‘My work tells the story of what I see as the last of East Anglia’s agrarian community. It is a place where traditional methods and knowledge are still very much depended upon, and the identity of the people is intimately shaped by the rural landscape upon which they live and work. Stoical small-time farmers, reed cutters and rabbit catchers: these are the East Anglians – the forgotten people of the flatlands who continue to work the land simply because the need to is in their blood’ – Justin Partyka.

Some of these photographs appeared in Granta 102, alongside ‘Ghost Species’, Robert Macfarlane’s essay on the Norfolk Fens. Granta.com showcased a collection of his photographs here. You can see more of Partkya’s work at his website.

Partyka’s photographs have been exhibited at Tate Britain, the Jerwood Space, Belfast Exposed, and the Norfolk Rural Life Museum, amongst others. Other publications include the Guardian, Source magazine and the British Journal of Photography. In 2005 Partyka received a visual arts award from Arts Council England.