Robert Darch Guest Lecutre 30th March 2017
























Born in Birmingham, 1979, Robert Darch is photographer, educator & curator based in the South West of England. He holds a MA with distinction in Photography & the Book and an MFA with distinction in Photographic Arts from Plymouth University. His practice is motivated by the experience of place, in which the physical geography and material cultures of places merge with impressions from contemporary culture that equally influence perception, which links to my current Landscape Project. 
Vale is a Landscape series by Darch that explores youth and nostalgia through the experience of place. Darch formed this topic because he became ill whilst studying his BA, this illness lasted for many years so in a way this project is about the loss of his 20's and what it could have
 been like. 
Vale Began with Darch's inital interest in landscape, he would take pictures without putting too much thought in them therefore it took him a while to realise what he was trying to say within his work. There was a wide source of inspiration behind the project which included paintings, literature and film stills. During shooting for this and other projects Darch credits luck for many images "things would happen that would kind of add to the narrative" 
speaking on vale Darch states "its constructed, ive created images (however) "a alot of the images are coincidences, natural but with an element of construction" 
Darch chooses the "characters" he works with from people he knows and talks of the benefits of having a wide social circle when it comes to being a photographer. He states he has to have a connection with his models because he has to spend the day with them, he also picks people that have some sort of connection with the location he is shooting. Vale was shot in the Summer so the type of light contrasts his later work 'The Moor', which was shot in Winter. 


The Moor 
In Darch's project "The Moor" he took inspiration from dystopian fiction including The Walking Dead which I myself am a huge fan of.He also referenced William Eggleston and the film IT. Darch states he still hasn't fully contextualised 'The Moor' but the characters included have no real explanation into why they are there. He wanted them to feel as if they were naturally in the space. He began the project by shooting small, documentary style images and it evolved into a narrative. 
Throughout the work you're building up a sense of narrative, the moor doesnt engage with the audience directly"


Finally Darch Spoke about his most recent project "Durlescombe" 
Durlescombe is an ongoing series of photographs made in Devon in the South West of England. The work documents the people, places, landscapes and local industries of a fading rural culture and in doing so explores my own attachment to a region where generations of my family have lived and worked for almost one thousand years. But alongside its preoccupations with a specific place and identity, the work also aims to mirror social changes that extend far beyond its particular context, those that have seen local distinctiveness, as expressed through communal traditions, patterns of labour, crafts and religious rituals, increasingly subsumed into a more globalised economy and culture.The deep historical resonance of these photographs extends back to the Norman conquest of 1066, which brought with it an influx of new settlers to Devon from Northern France and beyond. In 1631, during the reign of King Charles I, William Darch was born in Dolton, and he became the first in a long line of millers that would own and work grain mills across Devon. Many generations later, my four times great-grandfather Robert Darch owned and ran the mill in North Tawton until his death in 1805. I was born in Birmingham in 1979, and although I was aware that my roots were in Devon, during my formative years in the midlands I knew very little of this family history. More recently I have been increasingly drawn to work in and connect with places in this area, only later discovering their particular family connections and personal relevance. This sense of a shared history of place, along with a developing interest in remnants of that history, provided the catalyst for the Durlescombe project. But Durlescombe is a constructed, imaginary place. It is an amalgam, a typical village, unspecific and representative, one that provides a narrative distance from the persuasive mode of documentary realism and a space in which questions about familiarity, attachment and belonging might be asked. 

The images of Durlescombe – a layered assemblage of my photographs, family history pictures and found illustrations – are in this way both actual records and speculative fictions, which track my own pursuits to feel and find points of connection. The photographs are my attempt to map a learnt culture onto direct experience. The work also admits the potential of other, unconscious forces driving the ‘subjectivisation’ of places. 
Durlescombe is an on-going long-term project initiated while undertaking an MFA at Plymouth University.

Even though Darch has a somewhat film style aesthetic similar to that on medium format, Darch actually shoots on a Nikon D800 with 35mm and 50mm fixed lenses. 

Share:

0 comments