“What are you working on next?” If you have ever found yourself confronted with this question, let’s say after wrapping up an odyssey of a project, you may know the at times woozy, existential feeling of trying to answer. A sleek elevator pitch, a stream of vague but related concepts, or the somewhat anxiety-inducing, “I don’t know,” are all possible responses. How do we find our way to a new project? How do we come upon our next all-encompassing pursuit? And, perhaps most importantly, what might we find on the other side?
As the American photographer Barbara Peacock wound down her last project, she was already thinking about the next. According to the photographer Sally Mann, Peacock points out, this is a sign that you’re done. She knew she wanted to get onto the next body of work, but notes, “I didn’t have a clear or definitive idea of what that next project was. Except for this: I knew I wanted it to be a documentary. My whole life seemed to have been pushing towards a documentary of the same people, over and over.” Referencing earlier works, she explains:“Hometown was a series of fleeting moments. American Bedroom was made up of people I met for an hour and a half or so.” Facing down the start of something new, she was torn about what—and who—to shoot next.
Peacock had heard about the potato pickers in northern Maine, high schoolers who were given two to three weeks off to help with the harvest. Raised around paintings, and endowed with what feels like an encyclopedic knowledge and appreciation for art, it may have been the subtle echo of the first work of art that piqued her interest in the subject, Vincent Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters. “I was maybe seven or eight years old when I saw it, and I was enthralled. It was something different—something I’d never seen before. I was amazed by these people, by that image of daily life.”
In the end, the potato pickers were simply too far, but Maine and sticking close to home felt right. A keen and abiding interest in the quirks and routines of daily life in New England would lead Peacock to her next project, Searching for the Same Light, an immersion into the world of farmers in Maine. It is this notion of, even obsession with, photographing the everyday that animates her.
“What do I feel most passionate about?” was the self-imposed question that sparked her into action. The answer? Family. Placing an ad on Facebook—which, with an aside, she comments, “Yes, I know it’s ‘old-fashioned’ but it acts as a vital town message board in many communities”—she began looking for participants. “I said to myself, ‘No one is going to allow this. No one is going to allow me, an unknown person, to do this.” Then the responses started to come in. A single mother with four boys, a young family with three small children, and an older couple down the street have formed the core of her group. “I had to be absolutely honest with them about the work. In a documentary, when it gets a little touchy or uncomfortable, that’s the important stuff.”
The project is broader and more complex in its simplicity than older series. The scope is worldbuilding, capturing the routines and festivities as well as the in-between moments. In alighting upon this project, Peacock has felt a duty to represent her subjects as deeply as possible. Searching for the Same Light is the third series in what she considers an American trilogy alongside Hometown and American Bedroom. The concept of this “same light” is what unites them. “I wanted to remember that we, as people, are all looking for the same thing: for a good life, for love, for family. We’re looking for the light to shine on us, as we plod along, in the midst of this unsettled time.”
Peacock is “not afraid to say that I’m inspired by other artists.” These inspirations radiate across the work—in its colors, the immersion into community, and the use of light winding its way through the photographs and pulling them together. The title itself, Searching for the Same Light, comes from a piece by the British poet Warsan Shire. Our conversation is sprinkled with references to and quotes by Mary Ellen Mark, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Larry Towell, Eugene Richards, Andrew Wyeth, and Larry Fink, to name but a few. I find myself taking notes to use for my own inspiration. The sense of a voracious eye is omnipresent. In describing her images of the county fairs, she shares Henri Cartier-Bresson’s directive to “Never shoot the parade.” Through Peacock’s eye, we journey to the end of the fair to see the loading and unloading of animals, the set up and the breakdown.
And so Peacock has become a fly on the wall to the workings of these farms. Milkings and butcherings, picnics and parties. In one image, two boys stand nonchalantly alongside a turkey, legs out and blood spattering the wall. Farming is hard work, unglamorous, and yes, sometimes bloody. It is a family affair, and so in a light worthy of a Dutch master, we see a child lovingly splayed across a cow’s back and a chicken ready to be plucked of its feathers.
The children’s love for animals is a recurring theme throughout the work. From toddlers to teen boys, they cradle and caress their farm animals, take pride and show care. “It’s almost otherworldly,” Peacock observes, “They’re farmers at heart. One of the mothers said to me, ‘Farming is in our soul, just like photography is in yours, Barb.’”
The soul and the enquiring eye make a good pair. Peacock’s photographs brim with immediacy and the rhythm of a farm. “I want to go into each shoot with my own intuition and just feel it. I want to shoot the way that I see things. I don’t want a voice in the back of my head going, ‘you should be getting this and that.’ I might be missing things, and it is going to take me time to get all that I need, but if I put undue pressure on myself, I’m going to miss the magic, the poetry that I’m looking for,” Peacock explains. The poetry is drawn out by the slowness of the project; looking—truly looking—takes time. And so Peacock keeps returning as the seasons unfold and the light changes.
When she first began this project, Peacock wasn’t sure what she would find. “I was in turmoil trying to figure out what my next project would be. I’m happy I arrived at a work that really probes into who I want to be as an artist and what makes my heart skip a beat,” she explains. “I didn’t know that I was going to basically adopt and be adopted in the process. And that’s beautiful to me, that’s everything, because if you boil it down, that’s what life is really about—relationships, kindness, and love.” It is a fitting tribute to the work and her process that it comes back to the heart and family—the very answer that prompted this body of work. To quote Peacock herself, “Some answers reveal themselves as you go along.”
