For rural children, the natural world is an integral part of their personal world, and they are aware that it both lends a distinctive element to their personal identity and frustrates their social aspirations. These six photographs were taken of the same family around two Christmases, in 2004 and 2007, and reflect on how identities are performed and have changed over the years. The photographs were taken spontaneously and show how rural teenagers in particular live in the natural world on their own terms and in their own way, sometimes in alignment with and sometimes irrespective of conventional views of the countryside and the escape to a 'rural idyll'. In the 'at the field 2004' series the younger girl is in charge of the horse and dressed appropriate to her role, while her sister is the photography student in skirt and tights, absorbed in her obsession and carrying into the natural world her current non-natural world photographic project of Barbie mutilation. Yet both are engaged in a social world outside of the natural world, as the photographer plans to share her photographs online ( http://ihearthurrt.deviantart.com/ ) and the younger girl takes a break to look at photographs she's taken on her phone ('at the field 1 2004'), parallel forms of social interaction which reinforce their sense of membership of a common teenage social world.

Three years later in 'leopardprint 2007', the dress rules are reversed, the younger girl in dyed hair and leopardprint, the older girl sensibly in Wellingtons and olive green jacket in the background. In 'at the field 2 2004', the girls' mother helps, taken into a world she would never have envisaged for herself, much happier in 'long shadows 2007', a human with dog passing through the landscape. There are three levels of interaction with the natural world: as people acting on the natural world where there is an effect which is distinctively human and continues after the participants have gone ('at the field 2004' series - the feeding of the horse), people in the foreground, the natural world as backdrop ('leopardprint 2007') and people as a transitory presence ('long shadow 2007' and 'by the pool 2007') where they pass through the landscape as many other creatures will during the day. At all three levels, there is a social effect beyond the moment, through memories, photographs and internet communities. Finally dogs and horses are also social creatures, whose social world is integrated into that of their human companions; an intersection of natural and social worlds across species.