The indeterminate stretches of land where suburban housing estates end and the English countryside begins can often carry a strange sense of foreboding. In the paintings of the contemporary British realist artist George Shaw, for instance, gable ends and rows of disused garages appear oddly ominous. Likewise, the scraggy paths that lead into nearby fields or woodlands, where ragged strips of tarpaulin hang from branches and abandoned porn mags lie among the dead leaves. If evidence proves that bad things can happen anywhere, our imagination, rooted in childhood anxieties and experience, tells us that they are more likely to happen in and around these untended spaces.
In John Spinks’s quiet photographs of the unnamed Warwickshire mining village where he spent his childhood, that sense of foreboding is not so prominent, but it’s there all the same. The first sequence of images is of woodlands rather than the paths that lead to them. Trees are shrouded in mist or wreathed in dead foliage, and the mulchy ground is marked by tyre tracks and by more mysterious traces of human intervention. The inevitable tattered tarpaulin hangs from a makeshift shelter and, elsewhere, a grey cotton sheet hangs over outstretched branches forming the kind of spectral silhouette you would not want to glimpse as dusk descends.
It takes some time – 12 images in, to be precise – to reach the new village of the title, its sloping rooftops finally glimpsed across a field of tall, dead stalks. So begins the central section of the book, which comprises more formal studies: full-length portraits of individual inhabitants interspersed with almost deadpan photographs of the ordinary houses that they live in. Men stand stiffly before the camera, often seeming intent on staring it down. The young appear slightly more relaxed, but still unsure of themselves and the reason they are being photographed. Here, too, is an air of in between-ness: the village, which Spinks has been photographing at intervals since 2000, still seems unfinished in the manner of many suburban new towns of the 1960s and 70s.
The final section takes us back into the woods: marshland, streams, sodden leaves, tangled branches and ponds overhung with thin, leaning saplings. The cumulative power of these images is rooted in their small, but revealing, details – the glimpsed circular rim of a half-submerged tyre at the centre of a marshy landscape – as much as their precise formal composition and autumnal colours. Throughout, there is a quiet attentiveness that is a kind of signature, but, as David Chandler points out in his accompanying essay, there is also a sense of hesitancy bordering on wariness. It is the wariness of the returning local, who still has family and friends living in the village, and whose sense of belonging is complex and made more so by his inquiring camera.
Anyone who grew up in and left a village will sense that apprehensive approach and fractured sense of belonging, the one informing the other. It may remain elusive to anybody else, though. The New Village can also be read as a quiet, meticulous meditation on a particularly English kind of place, one that, for all the fascination it exerts on the photographer who grew up there, continues to withhold as much as it reveals.
• The New Village by John Spinks is published by Bemojake (£30)
