The Burnthouse Lane estate was initially envisioned by Exeter Council in the idealistic 1920s to relocate impoverished residents from the West Quarter slum. Conceived along Garden City principles and intentionally self-sufficient, it provided a home for working-class families. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy led to some properties becoming privately owned, yet Burnt House Lane remains known as a council estate. The deprivation it aimed to alleviate persists, but the estate’s seclusion and complex network of lanes have fostered positive aspects, including a tight-knit community and a sense of solidarity among its residents.
Michelle Sank has garnered an international reputation for her compelling environmental portraits and landscapes. She has published four previous books and has exhibited extensively worldwide, with her work included in many private collections. Born in South Africa, Michelle Sank moved to the UK in 1987. Growing up during Apartheid and being the daughter of Latvian immigrants, she credits this background with shaping her interest in sub-cultures and her exploration of contemporary social issues and challenges. Her meticulously crafted portraits and landscapes blend place and person, creating sociological, visual, and psychological narratives.
The esteemed photographer David Goldblatt praised her portraiture, noting “an unstrained yet visually sophisticated synthesis of subject and context… people are not typecast or stereotyped; they are just ‘ordinary’. They appear entirely themselves, and Sank has allowed each of them simply to be… something has been evoked that seems to come from deep within… it is the unique spirit of the other person.”