All Among the Barley, by Melissa Harrison (2018) is set in rural Suffolk in 1933. Constance (Connie) FitzAllen a journalist/writer arrives in the village of Elmbourne to collect stories and record traditions that are dying out in the face of 20th century progress. She befriends fourteen-year-old Edie Mather and ingratiates herself with Edie’s family and farm workers at Wych Farm. As she spends time with the family the political tone and conflicts of the 1930s emerge and tensions are created.
Constance uses the material she gathers to write a series of articles, ‘Sketches from English Rural Life’ for the English Pioneer, the voice of the Order of English Yeomanry. Constance is anti-Semitic and the Order has a fascist agenda.
As the family gathers in the fields for the harvest Connie appears and announces: ‘Oh – this is Charles Chalcott, everyone: he’s a photographer. He’s come to capture some rural scenes – isn’t it the most perfect English Arcadia, Charles?’
Connie chats with Edie’s parents. Edie narrates:
‘Mr Chalcott, meanwhile, had taken the black camera from its case and was peering into the top. I hurriedly moved out of the way
“Oh, don’t worry, miss,” he said with a smile. “I’m just making adjustments for the light. I’m not taking a picture of you.”
I was relieved: there was something horrible about the thought of a man peering at me through his apparatus and taking an image of me away. … for some reason it felt unbearable to me. And perhaps a photograph would reveal what had changed in me, something that for now I needed not to be seen.’
Chalcott asks Mr Mather if he may take photographs on his land, ‘Work away, Mr Chalcott. You photograph anything you like.’ But there is a dissenting voice.
‘Not quite,’ John called over … ‘I’ll thank you not to make any images of me.’ John in John Hurlock, the horseman. He is a socialist, a member of the local agricultural union and has seen Constance for what she is.
The political tensions burst into the open at a meeting she has organised (with free beer) at the Bell and Hare. Edie goes, creeping in the back door. She is noticed by the wheelwright’s apprentice.
‘”Well, if it isn’t the famous Mather girl herself,” he said now, and elbowed his companion. “Look who’s here!”
… more men nearby were turning round to look at me; I felt their eyes on me, probing and keen. What had the wheelwright’s apprentice meant by “the famous Mather girl”?’
The meeting ends in chaos and Edie sees, ‘… on the floor … a discarded magazine, trampled by boots, [and] an image of my face smiling idiotically out at me from the crumpled page.’ Outside, Edie reflects on the picture.
‘I … wondered what words she [Connie] had used it to illustrate. … I was holding a wheat-sheaf and shading my eyes with one hand, looking not quite at the camera but over to where Frank had been stooking, perhaps. It was both me and not me, and I thought about the possibility that hundreds of people might have seen it – had a seen it already. It had been stolen from me, my own image pressed into the service of something I hadn’t consented to and didn’t understand.’
She concludes, ‘That this could happen was further proof that I was not a real person … not real in the way other people were real.’ The extent of Edie’s vulnerability is revealed in her subsequent story.
Photography does not play a big part in the wider narrative of All Among the Barley – the incidents covered above are dealt with in only a few paragraphs. But it does highlight the issues around consent: is it sought, who can give it and to what is the subject giving consent? Edie does not give consent, the photographer is dishonest and nobody sees, much less understands, her fragility.