To say that photographer Anne Rearick is fond of the long-term project would be something of an understatement. Year in and year out, she has been returning to the tiny, rural villages that speckle the hills of the Basque country. She has been doing this for—ready?—34 years. In her beautiful and quietly moving new book, Gure Bazterrak (a Basque phrase which loosely translates to “our land”), she documents the slow rhythms of country life over the course of a generation. “I’ve photographed about 50 villages in this province,” she told. “Some are a few miles apart, others 20 miles or more.”
Anne’s photographs feel like earthy poems. She takes us inside humble homes, to the top of rolling mountains, along lonely roads, and she shows what lives lived alongside animals feel like. When asked what catches Anne’s eye, what leads her to take a picture, she said: “I love the mountains, people and animals. When I have all three in front of me, I’m in my glory. When I’m feeling shy and less charming, I make formal pictures and landscapes.” She went on: “Light, form, tenderness, beauty, life, and even death; these are the things that make me want to make pictures.” Maybe nothing much happens in these small towns, but maybe everything does. Either way, Anne estimates she’s made more than 25,000 pictures trying to capture it.
One of things that attracts Anne to the Basque people is that they have managed to retain their language, land, and culture while straddling both France and Spain. “I think a thread that runs through my work is survival,” she said. During Franco’s time, of course, the Basques were deeply oppressed, forbidden from speaking Basque in public places, not allowed to use their Basque names. Anne has also shot in poor, post-apartheid South African townships and in a gritty mining town in Kazakhstan where the struggle to survive is simply a part of life. “There’s an element of survival that I admire and relate to.”
Anne Rearick is a high school teacher in Massachusetts, where she’s watched kids grow up and cycle out of the school, and in her photographs, you can sense that observational tenderness for the life cycle itself. What does she hope viewers feel from her pictures? “I want people to see the beauty and poetry in everyday life. I want people to understand the value of slow time; the importance of empathy, community and connection; and the courage it takes to be a farmer.”
Gure Bazterrak is published by Deadbeat Club and is available here for $60. On Instagram, Anne Rearick is @annerearick.
