Tessa Bunney

For over 25 years, Tessa has photographed rural life, working closely with individuals and communities to investigate how the landscape is shaped by humans. From hill farmers near her home in North Yorkshire to Icelandic puffin hunters, from Finnish ice swimmers to Romanian nomadic shepherds, her projects reveal the fascinating intricacies of the dependencies between people, work and the land.

 

Her long term project about flower farming includes FarmerFlorist celebrating the domestic flower growers of Britain, The Road to Tambuzi a collaboration with a Fairtrade rose farm in Kenya and most recently The Flower Fields, a commission from NEPN (North East Photography Network) about flower farming and technology in Lincolnshire which was published in 2021.

 

FarmerFlorist was recently published by Another Place Press as part of their Field Notes series and in early 2020 her exhibition ‘Otherwise Unseen’, bringing together four series which explore various rural communities in Europe and South East Asia was shown at the Side Gallery in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Britain’s only documentary photography gallery.

 

Between 2012 and 2016 she was based in Laos where she was working on her long term project The Corridor of Opportunity which was supported by Arts Council England and undertaking editorial and NGO commissions throughout the Southeast Asia region. The series The Women of UCT6 which documents an all-female UXO clearance team in Laos was published in the Financial Times Magazine (UK) and online.

 

She is currently working on Made out of Orchards commissioned by the Martin Parr Foundation and Going to the Sand, an ongoing personal project collaborating with Morecambe Bay fishermen.