It’s been 28 years since news and professional photographer John Gaines captured images of women working the farm for a special Hawk Eye section.

“Rural Women: Partners on the Farm,” dated Nov. 19, 1995, includes black and white photo essays by Gaines with stories by then-Hawk Eye reporter Criss Wilson, that mainly follow Primrose hog and crop farmer Janice McCarty, and Fort Madison dairy and crop farmer Sherri Hartson.

Gaines decided to feature the changing face of rural women, based on a colleague’s idea for a news story.

He spent months on the McCarty and Hartson farms, shadowing and photographing the work glove, denim and boot-wearing women feeding and chasing hogs, cleaning manure from a child’s feet and a from holding pen, doing the morning milking, and, home chores like cooking lunch and navigating toys scattered in a playroom carrying an armful of laundry.

Gaines, a self-proclaimed “city boy,” in the 1995 newspaper tab summed up his observations — “The dirty hands, manure on their pants, working day and night, year-round with little time off.”

For his art exhibit called “Women: Fabric of the Farm,” Gaines will retell the extraordinary stories of these remarkable women — with whom he has reconnected — once more through his poignant, raw, inspirational images, for Vice Night from 5-8 p.m. Friday at the Art Center of Burlington. Admission is free.

To prepare for the event, Gaines brought out the long-stored color negative film, and rescanned some of the photos.

“The new show will be in color rather than the old black and white,” he explained.

“The editorial, documentary-like nature of John’s work is an ideal fit for a subject like this. His years of experience and his mastery of the art of storytelling, and ability to authentically capture real people, in their genuine environment is always so poignant and compelling,” said Elizabeth Pappas, executive director of the Art Center.

“We’re excited to delve into this topic, and these beautiful stories Friday night,” she said.

The Vice Night show will display parts of the original Hawk Eye tab, and in addition the display will feature new photos from the Blue Knoll Dairy Farm, the last remaining dairy in Des Moines County, photos from the Des Moines County Fair, future and past, and portraits taken at the 2023 fair.

For the show’s rural theme, “I found some really cool barn wood at the Preservation Station to display the pictures,” he said.

For that spring, summer and fall of 1995, Gaines out of necessity bought his own farm boots that unbeknownst to him at the time would prove once again invaluable during the floods of 2008 and 2015.

He still owns the boots that he recently wore to take recent photos, and will display those at the Art Center.

In the middle of one night all those years ago, he quickly grabbed the boots and headed out to the Hartson farm for compelling photos captured for the assignment.

“I got a call at home and Sherri said ‘Hey, we’ve got a calf coming out. Come down if you want pictures.’ I had to race off to the barn, from Burlington to Fort Madison, and got there and they pulled the calf out, incubated it, got it good to go and so I kind of captured all of that. It’s all part of the cycle of life, and those pictures will be there,” said Gaines.

Gaines returned to Primrose and got a picture of McCarty with family members.

The McCarty’s, he said, are semi-retired, but now are helping their son on the farm.

He spoke with Hartson on the phone and also took a newer portrait of her.

“She’s not farming anymore. They got out of the dairy farming business. She lives in the family home where she grew up,” he said, noting that she now works for Lee County.

After all these years, Gaines still appreciates the experience he wrote about in a blurb in the 1995 Hawk Eye feature, with the two women who he said “were so generous with their time.”

He wanted to portray the importance of farmers to the whole state and country, and he believes the women truly helped bring that to the forefront.

“While documenting these two women throughout the spring, summer and fall I acquired an affectionate appreciation for the hard work that occurs in the rural community … I thank them for giving us a looking-glass view of their farm lives,” he said.

Friday’s event will feature music by Eric Pettit and Ed Mansheim, and beer, wine and charcuterie for sale.

The photographs also will be available for purchase.

Parking will be available in front of the Art Center. The intersection of Jefferson and Third streets is blocked, but people can enter through the main entrance on Jefferson Street or the side entrance on the south side of Third Street.on

“I’m getting old,” cackles Michael Kenna, when I ask how it feels to look back on 50 years in the photography business. “Much wiser,” he says, before cackling again. “I wish.” I’m talking to the English photographer over video from his office in Seattle, Washington, where he is surrounded by filing cabinets and binders stuffed with some of the 175,000 negatives that are his life’s work. Over the past half-century, Kenna has marked himself as one of the world’s most distinctive and influential landscape photographers, known for minimalist compositions often featuring otherworldly light.

This year marks half a century since he started working as a professional photographer, and he’s ringing in the occasion with a book, Michael Kenna: Photographs & Stories. It features 51 images, one for each year of his career. “We were going to call it Michael Kenna (1973-2023): Photographs & Stories,” he explains. “But I’m not dead yet, and including dates gives a different idea.”

Kenna turns 70 in November. “I’m fine about being my age and staying in the game for 50 years. When you start, you have no idea you can maintain your passionate hobby and survive.”

Born in the industrial town of Widnes, Cheshire, Kenna studied at St Joseph’s College, a seminary boarding school in Lancashire, with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest. But the image, rather than the Word, turned out to be his true calling, with Kenna enrolling at Banbury School of Art in Oxfordshire in 1972. A year later, he says, “I began doing semi-professional jobs: working for magazines, making record covers, book covers … I was working pro, as well as being a student, as one does to survive.”

Kenna moved to San Francisco in the late 70s, and has lived in the US since, relocating to Seattle in 2007. His subjects over the past five decades have been remarkably varied: English power stations; US car factories; the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea; Catholic confessional booths; Buddha statues.

But Kenna’s core focus is natural landscapes, using his film cameras to create meditative black-and-white images of trees, coasts, snow, bodies of water and lone structures. “I try to photograph the unseen,” he says. “It goes back to my early religious background of training to be a priest, of living with silence, discipline and prayer; seeing the light on the altar and believing wholeheartedly there was a God, an unseen presence around us that’s very powerful.” Although his religious beliefs have since changed, “I still believe there’s an unseen presence,” he says. “When I photograph anything, I’m trying to look beyond and below the surface.”

Likening his approach to a friendship deepening over time, Kenna repeatedly revisits countries and locations, including Italy, France and, particularly, Japan. “Nothing ever feels like it’s closed, finished, or like the end of the book,” he tells me. “It feels like there are always possible new chapters.” Japan is a key inspiration, a place he’s returned to often over the years, the wintry north especially providing the stark landscapes captured in many of his best-known images. He first visited in 1987. “I was blown away by the aesthetics, the spiritual and religious aspects, the curiosity of people, friendliness, cleanliness,” he says. “I went up to Hokkaido, in the north, in the middle of winter, and it looked to me like an absolutely stark sumi-e ink painting, a completely white canvas with Kanji characters marked on it. I’ve been in love with the place ever since.”

He recently exhibited new work from Japan at SOL LDN and he’ll be returning to Japan in 2024, to not only photograph but also perform – by invitation – at a major karaoke concert in Asahikawa. “There’s a bar I go to every time I visit Hokkaido called Oak. To start, I wasn’t very good. But my singing has improved.”

I’ve spoken to Kenna several times over the years, and he always strikes me as very Zen – a man who has figured out that the secret of life has more to do with slowing down and appreciating nature than rushing around or arguing with strangers online. “I don’t spend much time stressed out at my desk, hunched over a computer. I’m not a fan of social media – I don’t have a Twitter account. I spend a lot of time walking, searching, breathing fresh air. Photography is a very nourishing profession. It’s very meditational. I like to take my time and enjoy the company of my subject matter. For me, it’s about doing something you love doing. That’s the essence of life.”

Minimal impacts: six photos by Michael Kenna

Field of Sticks, Hokkaido, Japan, 2023
“Hokkaido makes a lot of white wine. My guide took me to a wine-making area. This scene was by the side of the road. I jumped out, walked into the field and photographed. The light in Hokkaido is sometimes so stark because of all the snow, so I had to figure out how to make an exposure that took into account the shadows and the highlights. Sticks in fields are one of my passions.”

Wave, Scarborough, Yorkshire, UK, 1981 (main image)
“I remember crossing the Pennines and picking up an Irish hitchhiker, says Michael Kenna. “At Scarborough, he jumped out and said: ‘The luck of the Irish to you.’ It was very prescient. As I walked along the harbour, a wave kept hitting the wall. In this photo, it was like the wave had raised itself up, ready to drop. I hadn’t realised how close it was to Hokusai’s famous Great Wave.”

Stone Pine Tunnel, Abruzzo, Italy, 2016
“I was in Abruzzo and went into a grove of stone pines. I could see it was a beautiful tunnel. The idea of light at the end is always wonderful. I love leading the viewer into an image without there being a destination. But the intrigue for this image is the darkness up in the canopy, which I didn’t see at the time. It has a strange, otherworldly aspect.”

Torii, Study 4, Honshu, Japan, 2007
“I’ve photographed torii gates, which are often at the entrances of Shinto shrines, since 2001. Shintoism is an animistic religion: they believe the gods reside in the landscape. You find gates scattered throughout Japan. They remind me to appreciate the landscape and how beautiful and fragile it is.”

Camp de Rivesaltes, Study 13, Pyrénées-Orientales, France, 2022
“When I arrived at [second world war internment camp] Rivesaltes, it was pouring with rain, which is unusual for the south of France. In my usual fashion, I wandered around the periphery and slowly worked my way to the centre. Just after the rain had stopped, there was moisture on the ground, and a heaviness in the atmosphere that seemed very potent. It went well with the atmosphere of the place.”

Percy’s Perspective, Hokkaido, Japan, 2023
“A Scottish photographer I know called Bruce Percy found this location in Hokkaido. When I went there, it was snowing heavily, so I couldn’t see far. I set up my camera, and suddenly the clouds parted – this beautiful white cloud came into view. I made this photograph. It happened to be the 12th exposure, the final one on the roll of film. By the time I got the new roll in, the snow had come back.”

Michael Kenna: Photographs & Stories is published on 20 November by Nazraeli Press.

In the thick of winter 2021, photographer Siân Davey’s 33-year-old son proposed a family project. “Why don’t we fill our back garden with wildflowers and bees, and the people we meet over the garden wall, we’ll invite them in to be photographed by you,” he said. Davey and her four children were galvanised by the task and set about clearing the small, neglected garden of their cottage on the Dartington Estate in Devon. The resulting photographs show passers-by, friends and family — including Davey’s daughter Alice, pictured here — as they react to the profusion of flora. What we see, says Davey, is “the chemistry between humans and nature”.

That alchemy is at the heart of this year’s Prix Pictet exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where Davey is showing alongside 11 other photographers shortlisted for the sustainability-focused award. Each entry for the SFr100,000-prize was selected for its relevance to this year’s theme: “human”. “In a world facing unprecedented challenges, from social inequality to environmental crises, it was crucial to turn the lens towards humanity itself,” says Prix Pictet’s executive director, Isabelle von Ribbentrop.

Hoda Afshar, an Iranian photographer based in Australia, is also presenting work about an emotional and spiritual relationship with the Earth. Her project, titled Speak the Wind, which featured in this magazine in 2022, explores a belief held by people in the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, that the wind can come to possess a person and cause them harm.

Other photographers were interested in the precarity of children’s futures. The UK’s Vanessa Winship and New Delhi-based Gauri Gill focused on the challenges and joys experienced by schoolgirls in rural villages — in the harsh, dry landscape around the borderlands of Eastern Anatolia (for Winship) and Rajasthan (for Gill), where droughts and monsoons can change the fate of a year. They featured in the magazine in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Polish photographer Michał Łuczak and Lima-based Italian photojournalist Alessandro Cinque each chronicled the impact of mining on the people in their communities.

Here, we look at four nominated photographers offering new perspectives on the human.

Siân Davey
Devon, UK

The Garden

Among the native wildflowers that Davey and her family planted in their garden — meadowsweet, wild carrot, sunflowers, poppies and cornflowers, as well as structures for clambering gourds and sweet peas — the photographer also placed chairs and chaises longues for her subjects to rest on.

Davey spent 15 years working as a psychotherapist before turning to photography, and says the garden, replete with couches, explores a similar principle: “how a space can enable someone to inhabit their true self”. Some stripped off their clothes and lay against the cool of the grass, others wandered through the flowers. “People bring in their ancestry, they bring their hopes,” says Davey, who’s still welcoming new subjects, “their lack of purpose, their longing for purpose, their grief and their profound joy”.

Michał Łuczak
Upper Silesia, Poland

Extraction

Łuczak was raised in a region of southern Poland where coal has been mined for the past 200 years. “When you are born in this landscape, it’s quite normal,” he says of his relationship to the industry. But his perspective changed when earthquakes — caused by the ground adjusting to the hollow, mined-out spaces — became more regular.

“It was so frequent that I was annoyed with it,” he says with a laugh. He began to photograph other “consequences” of mining: the small lakes and rotting trees created by eroded ground, the patterns of coal dust on the skin of the miners, the crooked slant of a sinking house. The project has also become a way for Łuczak to think about his conflicted feelings around coal, “or black gold, as we call it here”. “We have to find a way to disconnect from this kind of extracting, but to remain with our tradition,” he says.

Gera Artemova
Kyiv and Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine

War Diary

Artemova began her visual diary on the morning of February 24 2022, when she was awoken by the sound of explosions in her Kyiv apartment. Russia had begun its invasion of Ukraine. The next day she moved with her family to a tiny house in a village in Cherkasy Oblast, 130km from Kyiv. She continued photographing daily life throughout the evacuation and their return to the city.

War Diary, the resulting body of work, is sequenced in diptychs: the hand of a fresco in Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv beside the hand of her son as he plays with a leaf in the village; the steam from a simmering pot next to the smoke from a bombed-out building in Kyiv. “You are cooking, and you see the beautiful light from the window and spring outside, but you can’t forget about the war and why you are there,” says Artemova. “The diptych shows both sides of this reality”.

Vasantha Yogananthan
New Orleans, US

Mystery Street

Off the back of a grant to shoot anywhere in the US, French-Sri Lankan photographer Yogananthan decided to explore the reality of life in New Orleans almost two decades on from Hurricane Katrina. He focused his lens on the generation born in the years following the 2005 storm, spending three summer months observing a group of boys as they became teenagers. In the resulting series, titled Mystery Street, we only see children.

“It seems like the city was abandoned by others,” Yogananthan says. “I liked the idea that the children would be on their own in an urban environment that was shaped, constructed, partly destroyed by past generations.” In this photograph, taken one evening in the park as the boys played football in “the blue hour, sunset hour”, the subject is watchful, looking protectively at something outside the group. Yogananthan says, “I was feeling that in this moment there was a sense of community, and there was a sense of hope.”

Prix Pictet Human, 2023 is at the V&A’s Porter Gallery until October 22

Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first