Conceived as a response to the Brexit vote, but also drawing on formative memories and past emotions to realise a sense of place that reflects the times we are living in.

The Island is a new book published by British artist-photographer Robert Darch. Originally conceived as a response to Brexit, the poetic black and white photographs convey the heaviness that he felt and reflect Robert’s anxieties and fears about a decision that will affect younger generations for years to come. The Island draws on formative memories and past emotions to realise a sense of place that reflects the times we are living in. 

“The windows had fogged up, the remnants of smiley faces slowly fading into the blur of the passing hedgerows. It wasn’t the most interesting journey, those seven miles between Droitwich and Worcester passed through the southernmost corner of the West Midlands green belt. Agricultural fields littered with pylons, blackened hedgerows and nowhere places clinging to the edge of the road.
The sky outside hung heavy, it had seemed that way for weeks.”
From ‘The Island’ by Robert Darch

The Island has an overriding sense of melancholy emphasised by the bleak monochrome imagery and cold winter light, shifting from dark corners, intimate portraits, misty landscapes and isolated figures. There is an unreality, a dreamlike quality and a horror that is prophetic of events to come. 

While personally I cannot fully understand the zeitgeist of folks in the UK – I presume it must be a very unsettling feeling to be unmoored from a socio-economic world which (love it or hate it) was a standard of daily life and livelihoods for people from Wales to Scotland, and Northern Ireland as well. The fumbling, stumbling, into-the-abyss kind of manner which followed the vote to leave the European Union rattled many people – and the change will echo and reverberate for generations. In The Island Robert captures that echo in the way it bounces off the hills, cliffs and faces he encounters.

“How can photography negotiate a world where reality has become odder than fiction? Darch’s latest series, The Island, provides an answer. Landscapes and portraits together capture a country racked with tension. They are shot in black-and-white, and suffused with an almost palpable melancholy. The sea, emblematic of Britain’s decision to detach itself from its neighbours, is a persistent and forbidding presence.”
British Journal of Photography 

---

The Island by Robert Darch
LIDO Books
1000 copies
Text and Images © Robert Darch
Lyrics © Fugazi, Dischord Records
ISBN 978-1-8382195-1-2
Design by Tom Booth Woodger
Printed in Istanbul by MAS Matbaa
Font: Cormorant Garamon
Paper: Arctic Volume Ivory 150gsm, Torito Dark Blue 270gsm & Materica Clay 360gsm 

To see more work by Robert Darch, or buy a copy of The Island, please visit: www.robertdarch.com