A photographer sheds new light on Constable Country

The phrase ‘Constable Country’ summons up a quintessentially English landscape: river and meadows, open vistas bordered by trees, the greens and golds of cultivated acres, with the wide (and often blustery) skies of East Anglia over all. John Constable (1776–1837) is one of our greatest artists and certainly one of the most popular. His vision of rural England has become a cherished ideal of how landscape should look, and is as much a state of mind as a real place. In actuality it is based around the village of East Bergholt where Constable was born, in the Essex–Suffolk border country, and extends through Dedham Vale and the valley of the river Stour. Constable famously painted nearby Flatford Mill, and the National Trust now administers a visitor centre there, which includes the Boat House Gallery, showing contemporary East Anglian artists.

Currently on view at the gallery is a small but choice selection of colour photographs by Justin Partyka (born 1972). Partyka trained as a folklorist at Memorial University in Newfoundland, a fact that is perhaps more obvious from his previous work with the small traditional farms of East Anglia. (In 2009, he held a well-received solo show of these agrarian photographs at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.) I asked him how his training in folklore had equipped him to become a photographer. ‘I think it opened my eyes to the potential of focusing deeply on specific things, and how a place shapes culture, shapes people, and what’s in a landscape — both the material and the intangible things. I was very interested in the American South and the work that has come out of it — the literature and photography and especially the music.’ The bluegrass music of Kentucky was an early enthusiasm, and Bob Dylan. ‘The very first photographs of Dylan were taken by a photographer named John Cohen, who is also a film-maker, folk-song collector and folk musician.