To an undiscerning eye, the tragedy haunting Murray Ballard’s beautiful ode to Salento—an area in southern Puglia, Italy—might be hard to detect. For the past 10 years, he has been photographing the devastation caused by a near-invisible plant pathogen called Xylella on the region’s ancient olive trees and its once thriving agricultural economy.

Ravished by the deadly bacteria, Ballard’s pictures show wounded trees in various states of decay, many engulfed by angry licks of fire as the diseased trees are burnt to clear the land. Up until a few years ago, nearly half of Italy’s olive oil had been produced in Puglia. Now, the landscape is in a state of flux as a centuries-old tradition fades out and a new industry of tourism takes hold.



In this interview for LensCulture, Ballard speaks to Sophie Wright about finding ways of visualizing the invisible, the shifting relationship between people and place, and the in-between space of working as neither an outsider nor an insider.

Sophie Wright: How did you first come to photography?

Murray Ballard: The first time I picked up a camera in any meaningful way was when I was about 15 years old. I was really into land artists like Andy Goldsworthy at the time. I made sculptures in the sand on the beach and I photographed them as the tide came in and washed them away.

I then got really into filmmaking. This was back in 2002 and the college was changing from analog to digital cameras. The editing software was always crashing, and I struggled to get my films finished. When I showed my tutors the results, they said my photographs were much more interesting. I’d only taken them for my sketchbook, but they said I should look at them again and think about printing them properly and presenting them as a final piece of work.

Around this time, I was also advised to take a look at Jeff Wall’s work. I went to the library and found his books and was completely blown away. I distinctly remember looking at a photograph called Eviction Struggle 1988 and realizing how compelling a photograph could be. From there I started learning more about photography as art and ended up applying to do a photography degree at the University of Brighton.

SW: Your work touches on the realms of science, technology and the environment. Can you elaborate on how you arrived at the interests that drive your work?

MB: It’s hard to articulate precisely what drives my work. I’ve always felt there’s a large amount of serendipity involved in my practice. Until recently I hadn’t really sat back and analyzed it too much, but I’ve just completed a Masters, which opened up a fair amount of self-reflection. It made me realize how much my upbringing and formative years have shaped me—I guess that’s true of everyone.

I grew up in the town center of a small town called Seaford on the south-coast of England. One of my earliest childhood memories is watching a supermarket being built at the end of our road when I was about five or six years old. I used to look through a hole in the fence for hours on end, staring at this enormous building site. When I was seven, we moved out to the countryside. I became best friends with the farmer’s son up the road. I loved spending my weekends on the farm. They were dairy farmers, and I was fascinated by how the farm worked—everything from growing the crops, to the cows being milked in the parlor.

When I became a teenager, the countryside seemed less appealing. I spent my weekends at a friend’s house in town. I’m the eldest sibling in my family and I’m not from a particularly arty family, but my friend had an older brother who introduced us to loads of interesting music and films, particularly all the science-fiction classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Blade Runner. This was my gateway into art, and, with hindsight, I think all these experiences set my art making on a particular path.

SW: You have a personal link to Salento where your ongoing project of 10 years Ghosts in the Fields is set, as your wife is from the area. When and how did your visits to the region turn into a project?

MB: Ever since my first visit in 2012, I’ve been photographing there. Initially it was just for fun, recording memories and a way of connecting with my wife’s family. On my second visit, I started going out by myself and photographing the local area. I loved the way so many people grow their own food there, and most families had their own olive groves and made their own olive oil. I was drawn to this simpler way of life. It felt like an antidote to modern living. But I didn’t really have a project until things started to change.

SW: In what way and how did this become visible to you?

MB: I remember people talking about the olive trees being affected by Xylella in around 2015 and 2016, but people were still getting a half-decent harvest of olives then. By 2018, there was nothing.

The following year, I remember going to visit the olive groves that belong to my wife’s family with my father-in-law and, when he saw them, he burst into tears. They were all skeletons; they hardly had any leaves. He used to tell us stories about harvesting the olives as a child and he would always point to this hollow in the middle of this big, ancient tree that he used to shelter in as a little boy. It was—and still is—incredibly sad. A whole culture wiped out in just a few years. That’s when I started to think maybe this could be a project, as I had pictures of life before and after Xylella.

The other major change was the growth in tourism. When I first visited Salento, you’d only ever see and hear Italians at the beach, but in recent years it has become the fastest growing tourist destination in the EU. Lots of money has been put into advertising. It’s now incredibly popular with British holiday makers and other Northern Europeans, and increasingly with Americans too. It feels very different there now in the summer. My wife’s family don’t even go to the beach anymore because it’s so crowded. It’s positive in some ways as it’s created more jobs, but only during the summer months. What do you do for the other nine months of the year? It’s complicated and that’s what I’m trying to reflect in my photographs.

SW: Had these interests in change manifested in any of your earlier projects or was this a new path in your practice?

MB: With a bit of hindsight, I can see how it has grown out of my previous projects. After I graduated, I started a project about farming—particularly small-scale family farms—in England; a way of life that felt like it was fading out. But the project never really got off the ground. It’s such a vast subject and back then I didn’t really know how to tackle it.

A few years ago, I went back through the contact sheets, made an edit of about 30 decent photographs and this became Rural Affairs—named after the British government department. There are pictures of old milking parlors being turned into office units, old barns being converted to holiday homes, farmland being sold for housing developments, a village shop closing as it’s unable to compete with the new supermarket in the nearby town.

More recently I was commissioned by GRAIN Projects in Birmingham to make work in and around Boston; a small market town in Lincolnshire, in the North-East of England, which voted with the largest majority to leave the EU. This contemporary portrait of Boston highlights the things that led people to vote to leave in such significant numbers, as well as the effects intensive farming is having on our environment and the damaging relationship between consumer culture and food production. So this interest in change and the transformation of rural life has always been there.

SW: In Ghosts in the Fields, you thread together the region’s past and mutating present whilst gesturing to how it might change in the future. Can you elaborate a bit on the area you’re focusing on and how it has changed since you first started working there?

MB: I’ve photographed all over Salento, but mainly around the south-eastern part of the region. My wife’s family lives in Cocumola, a small village 10 km inland from the coast, so most of the time I set off from there, which inevitably means most of the pictures are concentrated in that corner of the peninsula. The project is focused on life in the more rural areas.

Aside from the olive trees, there is tourism. When I first visited I never heard an English voice on the beach; it seemed to be a place only Italians went on holiday. Now there’s holiday makers from all over the world there. In Cocumola, there are now over a dozen places to stay listed on Airbnb.

But really it’s lots of subtle things that cumulatively mount up to make the place feel different. I’ve noticed that people don’t sit out in the evenings like they used to. The first few times I visited my wife’s family all used to bring their chairs out onto the street and sit outside chatting into the night with their neighbors, the children would all be playing together in the street. Now this is more rare. Instead, they’re sitting inside on their phones. These sorts of changes are quite difficult to photograph—visually they’re quite subtle—but they make the place feel very different.

SW: Echoing its title, the project deals with a lot of invisible entities and processes. From the culprit of destruction—the bacteria Xylella—to the global mechanics of trade that led to its arrival in Puglia to the gradual transition of the landscape. How did you approach this challenge photographically?

MB: I’m fascinated by the limitations of photography; how the world is shaped by these forces that we can’t see with our eyes, how a regular camera can’t take a picture of the bacteria—which has totally devastated this landscape and ended a centuries-old way of life. I’m currently working on a photobook of the project and I’m thinking of opening it with several pages of micrographs of the bacteria, Xylella.

SW: I find the recurrent images of trees really powerful—there is a visceral quality to them as if we can see the wounds of the disease. Can you talk a bit about what is going on here?

MB: The village where my wife’s family lives is surrounded by olive groves. I’ve got pictures of healthy trees before Xylella, and then pictures of the trees once they have been infected and lost their leaves—but the ones that really affect people are of the trees on fire. I remember waking up one morning when we were there in July 2022 and the whole village was shrouded in smoke. It filled the house. It was horrible, you couldn’t get away from it. The smell of smoke lingered for days.

The series is built around these pictures of olive trees on fire. I’ve got hundreds of pictures of olive trees, but these pictures emote the most. A viewer immediately knows that something is wrong. With my other pictures of dead trees, some people just think they were taken in winter. But of course, olive trees don’t lose their leaves; they’re evergreen.

The trees are being burnt to clear the land. Some people are planting a new variety of olive tree that is immune to Xylella, but often people are turning the land over to other uses. This motif tries to get across the sense of scale that this is happening on. As you travel through the landscape, you encounter mile after mile of these skeletal trees—it’s hard to comprehend unless you see it for yourself.

SW: The project really conveys a feeling of interconnectedness between the people, place, plants and other living things that share space in the area. Can you talk a bit about the people in your portraits and their relationship to the land?

MB: There are lots of pictures of people at the beach as that is where the tourists are. I’ve photographed lots of younger people there. I like their tattoos, particularly when they reference traditional cultural images, like spiders and snakes, which hold particular significance in the local folklore. Recently I’ve found young people with tattoos of olive trees. I met one guy with an olive tree in the palm of a hand tattooed on his thigh. He told me that the hand represents the hand of his grandfather, which represents his roots working on the land. He never wants to forget that. He has nothing to do with the land now, he’s in the Italian navy.

I’ve found that most of the young people I meet don’t want to work on the land like the generations before them. They want to move away and aspire to a more opulent life elsewhere. Obviously, this has been happening for a few generations now; my wife’s father was the first person in his family to move away and make a life in Germany, but it feels like the trend has dramatically increased in recent years. Nearly all my wife’s cousins have moved away to find work.

And this desire to move away is exaggerated by social media. I know Salento isn’t unique: people everywhere are being sold these dreams on social media that make them feel indifferent to the world around them, but I feel it more there—you look around when you’re on a beautiful beach in the middle of summer and people are on their phones, endlessly scrolling for something else. Of course I’m guilty of this myself, but when you step back, you just think: What are we doing? We need to put the phone down and just appreciate what’s right in front of us.

SW: What was it like to carry out this project in Italy from a more ‘outsider’ perspective?

MB: It’s definitely different. When I first started photographing there I wasn’t doing a ‘project’ so I wasn’t conscious or concerned about being an ‘outsider.’ But, when I decided to make this a ‘project,’ I started to think about my perspective as an ‘outsider’ looking at this place I’m not from. It’s strange, because I’ve married into this Salento family, and I’ve been visiting for over 10 years now, so I don’t really see myself as an outsider. I feel like I know the place well, but I’m aware I’m not an insider either—I don’t think you can really claim to know a place unless you speak the language, and my Italian is still terrible.

My perspective comes from someone who’s occupying an in-between space—not quite an outsider, but not an insider either. As I bring this project together, I do feel concerned about what the work says about a place I can’t claim to be an expert on. Obviously, I’m not claiming to say anything definitive about this place—I’ve just made an impression, a visual poem. But this is one of the reasons I wanted to collaborate with a writer from Salento for the book I am making.

SW: Tell me more about this text.

MB: On my last trip, I read The Book of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri, which is classed as a fantasy novel, but it’s set in rural Salento. There are so many astute observations about the place and the times we’re living in that made me think Francesco would be a wonderful person to work with.

In the novel the protagonist is from Salento, but he’s been living in London for many years working as a photographer. It starts with him coming back to Salento with this newfound perspective and observations about his home that really resonated with me. It turns out that, much like his protagonist, Francesco lives in London for much of the year. When I discussed my project with him, he really understood what I was trying to say and where the work was coming from, which was reassuring.

I also really like the idea of him writing about Salento from London, so he has an element of distance in his work too. We’re also both the same age so we have a similar perspective and experience of how we’ve witnessed the world change in our lifetime, which is important.

SW: Finding a way to communicate and tell stories about the environment in this era of crisis is notoriously difficult—from positioning the problem as a future catastrophe rather than a present one to focusing on large, dramatic events rather than the subtler shifts that accrue over time. Do any of these challenges inform your own practice? Do you think photography is well placed as a medium to combat some of these issues?

MB: Absolutely. I’ve made several projects that deal with the environment and sustainability. What I’ve tried to do is make work that relates directly to my own experience. It’s tricky because it’s a lot subtler than the dramatic events and imagery we’ve come to associate with climate change, so it often doesn’t register in the same way, but when people do get into it, I think it can have more of an impact because it’s relatable. With this project, and the pictures of the burning olive trees, it is more dramatic, which will hopefully draw people into the work and the subtler issues it highlights.

I think photography is well placed to combat these issues. It’s so ubiquitous now that it is almost impossible for images in and of themselves to make a tangible difference, but I think it’s an important tool and the accumulative weight of work on these issues can only move the dial in a positive direction. I certainly feel a certain obligation to make work that is part of a wider conversation that is trying to effect positive change.

SW: What do you hope people will take away from the project?

MB: I hope it will make people think and encourage them to reflect on the way we live our lives, as well as contributing to an ongoing conversation about life in rural communities and our treatment of the environment.

I hope it also celebrates the beauty of a simpler way of life and questions the direction we still seem to be going in, despite all the signs, that suggest this globalized, neoliberal capitalist system that prizes wealth for a small number of people at the top of society over everything else, might not be the best thing for humanity or the environment.

This might sound very grand, but I see the project as another piece of a much larger cultural movement. Last year I saw Alcarràs, the brilliant film by Carla Simón, which tells the story of three generations of peach farmers in Catalonia, who’s way of life is threatened by the diminishing value of their produce and the landowner’s desire to install solar panels on the land, which I found very moving. There’s a lot of work being made along these lines now and, hopefully, collectively they will start having an effect.

Editor’s note: Murray Ballard’s project was a Finalist in the LensCulture Art Photography Awards 2024. You can discover many other fascinating and inspiring photo projects on the winners’ site.