RETURNING PRACTICE

FARAS is approached over an extended period of time and from within the communities themselves, rather than through brief encounters. I try to build relationships and work alongside the horsemen, allowing the work to develop through familiarity, observation and trust.

The camera is only one part of the process. Time spent travelling, riding, listening and learning is equally important. I am interested not simply in the horse as an image, but in the systems of knowledge, ritual, labour and attachment that surround it.

The work is deliberately slow. Rather than seeking spectacle, FARAS looks for moments in which the relationship between horse, rider, landscape and community becomes visible.

Each chapter develops through research, conversation and sustained photographic observation, allowing the character of a place to shape the work rather than imposing a predetermined narrative upon it.

02/ METHODOLOGY

TO ENTER A LANDSCAPE IS TO BECOME PART OF IT.

SHARED AUTHORSHIP

FARAS recognises that these photographs are made through relationships, and that the people within them are not simply subjects of the work. Names, histories, permissions and context are part of the photographic process.

The project resists the distance between photographer and subject that can turn a community into an image. Wherever possible, the work develops through collaboration, conversation and repeated encounters. The people who open their homes, stables, landscapes and traditions to the project become part of its authorship.

This is particularly important when photographing horse cultures that have been represented through colonial, anthropological or romanticised frameworks. FARAS seeks instead to remain attentive to lived experience: to how horses are known, valued, worked with, cared for and remembered by the people whose lives are intertwined with them.

The resulting photographs are therefore not intended as definitive representations of a culture, but as fragments of relationships encountered over time.

Wherever horses remain essential, they reveal something profound about the people who depend on them.