Flock

Flock consolidates a long-term research engagement that considered the decline and dismantling of the last inner-city livestock Market in Britain. Beginning in 2007 then completed and published in 2014, the work uses portraiture and draws on large format and carefully rendered crowd scenes to consider the changes faced by the population who have engaged with the droving and sales rituals in the district since the 1300s. With the urgent redevelopment of the land a priority for the local authorities, the site was retired as an agricultural market in 2011 making way for a new commercial centre. Grant photographed in cooperation with the regular market goers –small holders, farmers and residents and foregrounded the weekly rituals engaged with by rural working-class agricultural communities on the border region of Herefordshire to make a sustained study of the agricultural relocation and the particular challenges and ageing of the community experiencing it. Early collaborations were made in public spaces, with exhibitions at Hereford Market and two newspaper/ magazine publications to foster support and participation, with the final publication distributed to those who were photographed. Copies of the publication were archived in Hereford Record Office alongside other significant documents of the City. A further exhibition of large-scale photographs at Hereford Photo festival supported the book’s circulation. As an account of the recent repurposing of British city space, the work was widely acknowledged. It was reproduced in the Sunday Times Spectrum section in 2014 and was internationally as part of the Italian ‘Landscape Stories’ edition on food. A series of the photographs were also included in a historical survey on rural living at the Guincamp Gallery in Brittany. Materials from the study were accepted by the Hereford Archive, a repository of documents and artefacts relevant to the progress of the City.