By Conor Risch

Somerset Stories: Fivepenny Dreams
By Venetia Dearden
Introduction by Jon Levy
Kehrer Verlag, 2009
Hardcover, 128 pages, $60

In her portraits of life in Somerset, in England’s West Country, some of Venetia Dearden’s subjects live itinerantly in caravans or wagons, and nearly all of them exist in concert with the landscape, farming and relying on what’s around for their livelihoods.   

“It is reassuring to witness the pioneering spirit of those living on and within the resources of their surroundings, but the preservation of this quality of rural life is tenuous,” writes Dearden in her statement opening the book, Somerset Stories: Fivepenny Dreams. Dearden, who grew up in Somerset, refers to her long-term connection to the land, and her recent disconnection as well—she now lives in London.

Of the roughly 60 color photographs in Somerset Stories, only a handful do not include children or adolescents as subjects. We see Chloe, perhaps as old as 8, backed by a field and wildflowers, bathed in sunlight in her red-checked dress, her feet obscured by the profile of her family’s dog, Minnie. Another child, Mikey, stands on a gray day in his bright blue Dickies coveralls and gloves, as a massive hog sniffs around the pen in the background. In another image, three children, none of them much older than 5, run around amongst chickens as their mother, Kate, works with one of them gathering eggs from the coop.

The prominent role children play in Dearden’s document of Somerset reflects the tight-knit lifestyles of the families she photographed. Instead of handing over their young ones to teachers or sitters while they are off in offices for a majority of their days, the Somerset parents often have their children alongside them as they work the land. The kids chip in, or at least carry on with their adventures in close proximity to their parents’ labor.

But more than simply a matter of circumstance, the focus on the adventures and experiences of these young people brought up close to the land understands that the hardship of maintaining the freedom associated with this way of life will fall to the children, who are at once vulnerable—because we know from Dearden’s introduction that development and modernity are rushing into the area—and more powerful-seeming than most adults: they know the land and are learning how to provide for themselves in ways unfamiliar to most of us.

In perhaps the most emotionally compelling photograph in the volume, captioned “Luke moves on,” we see an adolescent male hitching a flatbed wagon, piled with what we imagine are all of his worldly belongings, to his small, black horse. His dog is tethered to the back of the wagon. We know he is setting off, but we don’t know why or where to, and the scene is both touching and worrisome. We feel that if he’s simply moving to another area of Somerset to live off the land, he has all he needs. But if he ventures further he may be ill equipped for, and unhappy with, what he finds.