When photographer Rose Beddington went back to Lincolnshire to see the people and places she had documented in her 1997 exhibition Rural People Rural Lives, she found an unrecognisable landscape. The tangible connection between people who worked on the land and the local community had all but disappeared, in an area that is famed for its agriculture and food production.
This new exhibition shows the extent to which technological innovation, market forces and government policy have changed rural communities and the physical landscape over the past 20 years.
Nigel Curry of the Lincoln Business School states that rural life and agriculture are not the same thing. This new exhibition provides further evidence for this. There are far fewer people working in agriculture and fewer still who live in rural communities. The result is that the rural communities now have little or no connection with the business of agriculture taking place around them.
The exhibition includes both sets of images: the original black and white, hand-printed photographs and the recent digital colour images, themselves a barometer of change.
Rural People Rural Lives: A Changed Landscape
13 December 2016 – 8 January 2017
The Collection
Danes Terrace,
Lincoln,
LN2 1LP