“The Plain holds in perfect tension the light and dark sides of the British landscape, and deepens Friend’s engagement with landscape as a complex meeting ground of nature and state." Kate Bush, Senior Photography Curator, Tate Britain.
Introduction: The chalk grasslands of Salisbury Plain have been used since 1897 as a preparation ground for war. The heart of this ancient English landscape is an eerie and ambiguous space. The plain is both the UK’s largest military training ground and also a conservation area shared with archaeologists and dogwalkers, larks and corn buntings, wildflowers and rare forms of wildlife.
The Plain photographs reveal the military presence as a disquieting feature on the horizon: a rusty tank positioned as a target, a red box used for field telephones in a copse, smoke from an exploding shell. In the inaccessible ‘Impact Area’, a cluster of distant soldiers undertake firing exercises. Red flags warn the visitor to keep out; signage to the military remind them not to drive tanks over Neolithic barrows. Occasionally, there are closer encounters, with an artillery gun or an armoured vehicle, but often the landscape holds sway; manoeuvres are heard, but not always seen. The Plain continues my work on everyday militarisation, revealing how war is embedded in this most English of landscapes.
More about the making of The Plain:
Low res PDF of MF interview with Charlotte Parkin, extracted from On Landscape magazine 227, is now available here On Landscape, interview with Charlotte Parkin about The Plain (& other works)
The Plain book (Dewi Lewis Publishing, October 2020) includes an essay by Matthew Flintham, artist and writer. It is co-edited by Pippa Oldfield, Head of Programme at Impressions Gallery and author of Photography and War (Reaktion, 2019), and designed by Dean Pavitt. The hardback publication contains 43 colour plates (a selection of which can be viewed in the gallery above.
If you’d like to buy a copy of the book directly from Melanie Friend (signed on request), click here.
Timescale of the project: I started photographing on Salisbury Plain in August 2015 .I visited the plain just over a hundred times during the next four years until February 2020, when I took the last photographs for the book. In early 2016 I spent a great deal of time in and around small villages by the plain, interviewing local residents, making ambient sound recordings and getting to know the landscape of the plain itself.
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to the University of Sussex (School of Media, Film & Music) for research leave in early 2016, and to Spectrum Lab for their wonderful support. I’d also like to thank the fantastic team of people who worked with me on the book: Matthew Flintham (essayist), Dewi Lewis (publisher) Pippa Oldfield (co-editor) and Dean Pavitt (designer). And I’d like to thank all the individuals living right by Salisbury Plain who kindly gave me their time. Full acknowledgements are in the book itself.