THE PROJECT

South Downs Portraits is an ongoing photographic project. The series of photographs starts in 2002, when the establishment of a new National Park was in its earliest stages. Since then, the South Downs have become England’s most densely populated National Park.

This project is an attempt to describe a landscape through people whose lives are connected with it. For me, these pictures are social documents, a record of people and landscape at a time of change.

A first selection of ‘Faces of the South Downs’ was shown in an Arts Council funded touring exhibition in 2005. This was followed by two more exhibitions, in 2015 and in 2025, both at the Weald and Downland Museum Singleton, West Sussex. A book with a selection of photographs covering more than twenty years is published in November 2025.

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THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Anne-Katrin Purkiss is a photographer and picture editor with a special interest in portrait and documentary photography. She was born in Germany and studied Journalism and Photography at the University of Leipzig. After moving to England in 1984, she worked for four years at the London office of Associated Press before becoming an independent photographer in 1988.  

Her work relating to the landscape of the South Downs has included a commission for the Report to the Public Inquiry into the Designation of a South Downs National Park (2003–04), the Countryside Agency (since 2006 part of Natural England), the Commission for Rural Communities (abolished in 2011), Action in Rural Sussex, and the Sussex Downs Conservation Board (later to become the South Downs Conservation Board, followed by the South Downs Joint Committee and, in 2011, the National Park Authority).