From issue: #24 The Graduate Issue 2024
Ghosts in the Field is an exploration of life in rural Salento, southern Puglia. Ballard has been visiting and photographing Salento every summer for the past ten years, staying with his wife’s family in Cocumola, a small village 10km inland from the coast. During that time Ballard has witnessed dramatic change. Up until a few years ago Puglia produced nearly half of Italy’s olive oil, but a deadly plant pathogen, Xylella – thought to have been transported from South America on imported coffee plants – has decimated nearly all the region’s ancient olive trees and in turn the local agricultural economy. Alongside this, Puglia is the fastest-growing tourist destination in the European Union. A place that once seemed out of step with the modern world is rapidly evolving, and with it a generation’s aspirations and lifestyles.
Murray Ballard is a photographer based in Brighton, UK, whose practice spans the environment, social issues, science, and technology. He is best known for his long-term project The Prospect of Immortality, which investigated cryonics – the practice of freezing the dead, in the hope that future science will be able to bring them back to life. His commissioned work includes a residency at The John Innes Centre, Europe’s largest research centre for the study of crop plants and microbiology, which resulted in a newspaper publication and pop-up exhibition. He has also previously received a Photoworks commission, in collaboration with Willis Newson, to make work about the South Downs landscape, and a GRAIN commission to make work about the Lincolnshire farming community.
