Northern Exposures

Returning to the North East in 2001 to document the Durham Coalfield, at one time the heartland of the British coal industry, Chris Steele-Perkins found himself in that ex-urban culture that we now associate with "Billy Elliot". This world of "lamping" (for rabbits), ferreting, whippet racing, grouse shooting, pigeon fancying and the rearing of birds of prey is a survival of what D. H. Lawrence once described as "a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton". Chris Steele-Perkins has memorably recorded this with visual wit, and a constant eye for the extraordinary. Nor is he at all sentimental: the harsh realities of blood-stained slaughter-houses and the vandalism of fly-tipping in the open countryside aren't excluded. His photographs, he says, "serve as both eulogy and elegy".