Agriculture is an unavoidable fact of African life: it accounts for 70% of employment on the continent, and 25% of its GDP. Whilst Nickerson’s earlier work, ‘Farm’ , concentrated on how individual identity is made through improvisation, Terrain takes a broader view, focusing on the synergy between cultivation, workers and the environment. The result is a new kind of portraiture that steps away from photojournalism, refusing to merely illustrate statistics and moral indignation. ‘Terrain’ instead employs a reduced artistic language to draw attention to important debates around crop specialization, subsistence farming and food security. ‘Terrain’ is about human intervention in the natural landscape, the impact our presence has and the changes it brings about and how, for better and for worse, the world that we make, in turn, changes who we are.

Photographs by Jackie Nickerson
Published by TF Editores
Essay by Sean O'Toole
Edited by Paul Wombell
114 pages
240 x 294 mm
Printed hardcover
ISBN: 978-84-15253-94-5
Publication date: November 2013