Neither “rural idyll” nor “eerie backwater”: Joanne Coates documents her lived experience of working-class rural life

Joanne Coates always saw two distinct versions of the rural: picturesque, pastoral scenes or “eerie” shots of stagnant environments. Neither spoke to her lived experience as a working class woman in the countryside, and her work as a photographer bends to neither of these presentations. Instead, Joanne works directly with communities to make bodies of work that accurately explore class and rural life, letting herself “get lost” in research areas as she photographs them. The results are softly arresting, truthful, and unyielding in their dedication to her subjects.

“There are many marginalised groups in photography who have been the subjects but never the artist,” Joanne tells It’s Nice That. “I think it’s important that multiple stories are told…Everyone should be able to make work but equally if it’s one voice and that voice isn’t who experiences those issues, it becomes a problematic portrayal.” Joanne’s portfolio is living testament to this approach. Mainly collaborating with communities across the North and Scotland, Joanne creates work rooted in her own background which also holds space for different stories, each countering the idea of life in rural communities as a monolith.

One such project is Daughters of the Soil, a series looking at women’s contributions to the farming industry. “It is significant but often overlooked,” states Joanne. Through multiple stories, Joanne looks at underlying barriers, “such as access to land, class, motherhood, and hidden women’s work”, that underpin life and work for women in agriculture. Gender, and gender biases, in this area is something the photographer has been interested in for years. In the past, one of her particularly striking portraits was of Lauren, a “contract shepherdess, who travels the country lambing”, working wherever help is needed.

As for how Joanne approaches these series, on a project with community groups in Middlesbrough she spoke about “making portraits with people”, rather than of them, “getting them to look at and have a say in the way we make the image”. Her photography feels responsive, something that comes out of just listening to people, “to issues people tell me about that I’m intrigued by”, says Joanne. Then she asks questions, “through images”, she summarises.

Andrei Tarkovsky and Ron Jude are among Joanne’s main influences, “artists who explore poetics of place”. Her photography is similarly distinctive, yet it also holds a welcome separation from the likes of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Here, a place is not just an atmosphere and certainly not just a feeling; a zone is something lived-in, used and trodden-in, even if the stories of those who step through it are often not engaged with.

“I can’t speak for others in terms of how they choose to document or see rural life,” Joanne says. “For me, I feel, there is a very real threat to young low income people from those areas…in terms of housing shortages, second home owners, wealthy folk moving to the countryside, lack of jobs, schools closing, post office closing, pubs closing, etc.” These issues are wrapped into how Joanne documents her subjects, something she summarises wonderfully with her outlook on photography in general: “[Work] can be personal and political,” she says, “for me it’s more interesting if it’s both.”