Behind the vale
A er a period of illness and isolation in his 20s, Robert Darch was forced to re ect inwards. Vale is a response to that time. Peter Dench nds out more
Born in Birmingham, 1979, photographer, artist and educator Robert Darch has always been a dreamer. Also ambitious, determined and driven, in 2000, he secured a place to study on the prestigious Documentary Photography degree course at Newport, Wales. He couldn’t have dreamt what happened next. Just before the start of his second year, aged 22, Robert was rushed into hospital after suffering a seizure, later diagnosed as a transient ischemic attack (minor stroke). The terrifying experience was followed by a diagnosis for glandular fever then chronic fatigue syndrome M.E. Working mainly from home, it took him four years to complete his degree and ten years to recover enough to re-emerge into the outside world. During a decade of isolation and loneliness, he turned inwards, immersing his life in fiction, daydreams and films.
In 2008 Robert relocated from his Midlands home in a small town on the edge of the Worcestershire countryside to Exeter, a small city on
the edge of the Devon countryside. Around the corner lived Jem Southam, a photographer he admires. Robert then met partner and photographer Jessica Lennan, who was studying for a Master’s degree in Plymouth. Both encouraged him to re-enter education. Vale was completed as part of Robert’s Master’s degree in Photography and the Book (he would later complete an MFA).
Vale is a response to being constrained inside for long periods, a collection of photographs where Robert re-imagines the lost decade of his life, a time when
he should’ve been walking, swimming, travelling and romancing with friends. ‘It was a hugely frustrating period of my life, I watched people I studied with [at Newport] finding their way in the world, winning awards and living their lives. I had no control over my own life and that was the hardest thing to accept,’ reveals Robert.
Vale is self-published in the format of a hardback story book. The cover illustration is an echo of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a white house squats in a dark bending wood. The images inside are colourful, beautiful, a celebration and emotional response to the landscape. ‘Vale in terms of a project organically happened. I started making pictures in the valley just outside Exeter over one summer in the early morning, in the dawn and evening. I’d set up a collective for young photographers, an informal group. In the spring and the summer we’d always be out in this golden hour light and I just started taking pictures of the young people, they’re aged about 17, 18. I saw a lot of my younger self in them and it was quite nice to live a bit vicariously through them. I was always separate but good to be around the energy of youth and optimism. That underpinned it and it started making me think about that time I’d lost.’
There’s an essay by V&A curator Dan Cox but no captions, the viewer encouraged to construct their own narratives. Despite the allure, the pages are interwoven with an unsettling sense of menace, what Robert describes as eerie, something that doesn’t feel right; a swarm of bees in a log, a house cloaked in vine, a bridge on the verge of collapse. Perhaps the eeriness in his work is attributed to the volumes of James Herbert and Arthur Conan Doyle novels, mystery fiction and thrillers of the Italian giallo film genre, and Japanese horror films devoured during his solitude.
Robert developed from using the small 110 camera he was given for his fifth birthday and the old Praktica SLR given to him by his grandad to a medium format Bronica and Mamiya 7. For Vale he used a Nikon D800, utilising the 5x4 crop mode you see through the viewfinder, treating it very much like a medium format camera. He used 50mm and 35mm prime lenses unless it was difficult for him to get close – an orange moon, mass of insects, woman in foliage and lone swimmer, captured with a 70300mm.
Vale is timeless and relevant. A romanticisation of a summer of youth, beauty, landscape and loss from the lens of a photographer whose life was far away from what is normal, a life that many of us during the pandemic have been forced to experience.
The work you make as a photographer is often a reflection of the life you’ve lived. Ten years of illness feels a lifetime ago for Robert and a life that somebody else lived. At times it felt dark, much like Vale. He uses a documentary style to deliver his fiction, and his fiction is delivering a real-life for Robert that he’s not trying to escape. Always conscious he was a decade behind, he is making up time and making a living from photography – he’s living the dream.