Vale (Signed)

Publisher's Description

“Sensitive portraits and beautiful understated landscapes with a masterful treatment of light. He conjures up a fictional, slightly off kilter, even ominous depiction of rural England. I highly recommend it.” Paul Seawright

“The book perfectly depicts the “lost time” that chronic illness brings you, when it removes you from the life you once knew.” Clare Richardson

“Vale is the latest photobook by the artist, which he has self-published. Images of old trees, verdant valleys and hot summer hazes denote an archetypal British countryside and typify the narrative. Alongside this, disconcerting elements peek from behind; something can be felt amongst the trees. The beauty of nature faces a ghostlike, fractured, and melancholic stillness. There is more at play under the surface of this pastoral landscape.” The British Journal of Photography, Isaac Huxtable

Robert Darch’s latest work, Vale, presents a distinctly unnerving and disorientating experience. The expectation of a rural idyll is created from the outset; an archetypal English valley landscape pulled from a perfect composite memory. But this beauty is quickly undercut, disturbed by a cast of characters who seem unwilling or unable to play along with this bucolic vision. Darch has created a space where something else, below surface appearances, is happening. In the liminal space between fiction, narrative and reality, the intentions and outcomes of Vale have become intractably intertwined. However, we must respect the fictional boundaries of this place as if they were reality, even as this world itself begins to fall apart. Indeed, we might conclude that in our current situation within 2020, a sense of a loss of time is what might be driving our own search for the promise of truth that nostalgia seems to offer. But even as we are in pursuit of that promise, we may need to discard the veracity apparently offered by photography, recognising and ultimately embracing Vale as the manifestation of a lost time, with all the weight that such a loss implies. Dan Cox, V&A, excerpt from his Essay, The Vale of Despond