Review
The striking thing about the photographs in John Darwell s 'Dark Days' is not in the way they exist at the nexus of memory, history and personal knowledge. Most photographs do that, at least for a while. What is remarkable is that these photographs work both as specific visual information and as broadly evocative symbols, in a way that is not usually the case with the topical or photojournalistic. With literalness and inclusiveness, these images wrench us back to 2001 with an immediacy that seems to transcend the visual. With these pictures, we almost smell the piles of sheep carcasses; almost feel the smoke from the cattle pyres and burning feed troughs stinging our eyes. Details we might otherwise have forgotten become fixed permanently; what the roads looked like; farm machinery; a disinfection pad. When they no longer serve as aides memoires, some photographs diminish in meaning. I suspect this will not be the case with these pictures, due to their power to transcend historical detail and evoke what the events of 2001 felt like. Darwell has conscientiously told the story from beginning to end, but the images that resonate, and will, I believe, continue to do so are the relentlessly repeated images of isolation and closure, marking the desperate efforts of farmers to stay the spread of infection. Footpaths and lanes are marked Keep Out in a disconnect that looks and feels like the end of an era. 2001 was the summer that England s farms were closed and the countryside irrevocably changed. --Alison Nordström, Curator of Photography, George Eastman House

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In February 2001, Foot and Mouth Disease arrived in Cumbria. At its peak Cumbria was the worst affected county in Britain with a staggering 41 per cent of all cases. For the local community, the environmental and social consequences were to prove devastating. As a local resident, leading UK photographer John Darwell found himself surrounded by the effects of the disease. Over the next twelve months, he committed himself to recording what was taking place. Despite government reports to the contrary, the Cumbrian countryside became largely a 'no-go area', whilst on the farms thousands of animals were destroyed, their bodies burnt on the now notorious pyres. The ultimate clean-up of the infected farms led to extraordinary lengths being taken to eradicate the virus. "Dark Days" represents, perhaps, the most complete record of this time and provides a powerful and emotive insight into one of the most dramatic and destructive periods in British farming history. It is published in association with Littoral Arts.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews   The Nature of Beastliness and the Beastliness of Nature, 18 Mar 2007 By  G. Kippen (Manchester, Lancashire United Kingdom) - See all my reviews    beastliness - (adj) 1. Of or resembling a beast; bestial. 2. Very disagreeable; unpleasant. beastliness - (n) 3. malevolency, malice, malevolence - the quality of threatening evil (www.thefreedictionary.com ) Dark Days is a fine book which, like John Darwell's previous collection Legacy, photographs taken from within the Chernobyl exclusion zone, attempts to picture a very real but unseen threat to life and livelihood from disease and pestilence. Three chapters structure the unfolding horror of the 2001 Cumbrian foot-and-mouth outbreak through an image-narrative of burning, cleansing and after-effect, underpinned by powerful text essays of personal experience contributed by veterinary and other personnel who were in the midst of the disaster. The experience of the farmers themselves is powerfully captured in the photographs, written in the lines on their faces, the set jaws, the quiet tenacity which underlies an endurance sometimes on the edge of despair. The photographs of the first part make visible the `beastliness' of those terrible days. The mounds of burning animals, beasts of the field now piled high, legs stretched dead and rigid into the smoke-filled air like forlorn farewells, are described as `funeral pyres', which attempts to restore at least some ceremonial dignity to such an ugly end. These are the most overtly shocking images, contrasting sharply with the lush colour of the Cumbrian countryside, where smoke drifts in big skies like a distant warning, beauty threaded through with menace. Smoke, and the modest road signs and taped barriers are the only pointers to infected areas, these small patches of bright colour reminiscent of Paul Graham's visual clues in his photographs of the Northern Ireland conflict. Many of the images in the second section dealing with the cleansing of the infected premises display a love of colour and a nod to the disciplined composition of formal abstract painting; but rather than aestheticising the ugly, John Darwell chooses to contrast the heightened hues of the plastics - unnatural greens and blaring pinks of overalls, gloves, sacks and containers, the materials of warfare against a hidden menace - with muted natural hues, a cherry tree in bloom juxtaposed with a black-lined slurry pit waiting to be filled. Feet feature largely in this part, with faces and bodies often cropped out of sight, the working boots and shoes the only footwear that will tread the area until foot-and-mouth is eradicated. In contrast to the tough content of the first two, the last section is full of poignant symbolism. An abandoned tractor sits in a landscape of heightened green, a sad cotemporary echo of a haywain from another time. Shreds of wool cling to a fence in a field emptied of livestock - this is now the land of the disappeared. And although the book finishes with the gradual reopening of the countryside, in the melancholy objects of wool shreds and field scars marking burial sites, there are reminders of the nature of beastliness, palimpsests, like photographs themselves.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you?