The photographs on the following pages chronicle the experience of a Devon farm as the shadow of the Foot and Mouth epidemic fell upon it in 2001. These photographs are not intended to be representative of the wide range of different circumstances that so many Devon farming families had to endure during that year. Instead they stand as a singular and - despite their harsh reality - an elegiac testimony of how life changed on this one farm as the Devon countryside fell silent in the Spring of 2001.
For those whose lives were not directly affected by Foot and Mouth in 2001, the memories of the epidemic's impact may have already begun to fade. These photographs capture the sad picture of slaughter, of pain and of descending and consuming silence that so many farms experienced during the epidemic. They start with the everyday scene of cows being milked in the milking parlour; they finish with that same milking parlour left redundant and spotlessly clean - and a sheepdog in an empty farmyard with no animals to tend and nothing to do.
The value of these images stems directly from the alert and sympathetic eye of their creator, the noted Devon photographer, Chris Chapman. For over 25 years, Chris Chapman has been living among and working with farming families in Devon. Over this period, he has created a unique record of rural lives and landscapes. At the outbreak of the Foot and Mouth epidemic, it seemed only natural to look to him to create this sad, but essential record of the realities experienced on one Devon farm.
Copyright © Chris Chapman
Chris Chapman was commissioned to take these photographs by Beaford Arts with the support of Devon County Council. For over 30 years Beaford Arts, as a pioneering rural charity, has been enriching, through the arts, the lives of communities and individuals across the scattered landscapes of north Devon. The Beaford Photographic Archive (in which a larger selection of these photographs is being deposited) today stands as a rural record of regional and national importance, reaching back to the nineteenth century and looking forward into the twenty first. Chris Chapman's photographs are published here for the first time thanks to the co-operation of Beaford Arts (Director, Jennie Hayes), Philip and Percy Lake, and Robert Kilby.
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© Devon County Council, 2002.