Fenland Landscape Photography Monochrome

The Cambridgeshire Fenlands — Winter 2020/21 The winter of 2020/21 was, for many people, a period of enforced stillness — the lockdowns of the pandemic restricting movement and closing the usual routes of social and professional life. For me, it became an opportunity to engage more deeply with the landscape immediately around me: the Cambridgeshire Fenlands, which I had been photographing for some years but which I now had the time and the necessity to explore more systematic

Concealment and the Art of Christo — A Fenland Encounter Christo's practice of wrapping and concealing objects and landscapes is one of the most distinctive and thought-provoking bodies of work in twentieth-century art. By covering familiar objects — buildings, bridges, coastlines — in fabric, Christo transformed them into something simultaneously recognisable and strange: the form was preserved but the surface was changed, and the act of concealment drew attention to the obj

Two Houses on Ten Mile Bank Fenlands Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 Diane Arbus Don’t worry, I’m not claiming to have...

Submerged — River Great Ouse at Earith Submerged agricultural land is a recurring feature of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands at this time of year, but the scale and incongruity of scenes like this one never cease to arrest the eye. This image was made near the village of Earith and records the impact of controlled flooding from the River Great Ouse — a managed process by which excess water is directed onto low-lying fields to protect settlements and infrastructure downstream. The

Living Behind an Embankment — Ten Mile Bank Road Ten Mile Bank Road runs along the top of one of the Fenland's great embankments — a raised causeway that carries the road above the level of the surrounding fields and the river. To live behind such an embankment is to inhabit a particular kind of landscape: one in which the horizon is defined not by the natural topography but by a man-made structure, and in which the relationship between the land and the water is held in a con

Abandoned Farmhouse at Curf Fen Drove, Chatteris The abandoned farmhouse at Curf Fen Drove is one of many such buildings scattered across the Cambridgeshire Fenlands — structures that were once the centres of working farms, now empty and slowly returning to the landscape. The process of abandonment is gradual: first the windows go, then the roof, then the walls begin to subside into the soft peat beneath. The building becomes, over time, a ruin, and then a mound, and then not

The Ouse Washes in Flood ‘The Ouse Washes are part of a flood defense system. They are an uninhabited area of nearly six thousand acres...

At first sight, this looks like a mirror image, but it is a photograph of one of the arrow-straight tree lines seen across the Fenlands....

In the Fenland landscape, the telegraph pole is the dominant vertical. There are no hills, no church spires visible from a distance, no trees tall enough to punctuate the horizon with any authority. The telegraph pole does all of this work alone — a slender, utilitarian object that becomes, in the context of the flat open landscape, something close to monumental. I have photographed and painted telegraph poles many times. They appear in the Fenland series repeatedly, not as s

Fenland Farm Buildings at Hale Fen — Landscape Photography The farm buildings of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands occupy a particular place in the visual character of this landscape. Isolated, functional, and often in various states of repair, they punctuate the flat terrain with a directness that is entirely in keeping with the utilitarian spirit of the Fens. At Hale Fen, this quality is especially pronounced: the buildings sit low against the sky, their forms simplified by dista

Saint Bartholomew (Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:14, Acts 1:13) never set foot in Milan but his statue has been the talk of the town...

New Forest Residency — First Week of Paintings The first week of the New Forest residency produced a group of paintings that were, in many ways, a departure from my usual practice. Working in an unfamiliar landscape, without the accumulated familiarity of the Fenlands, required a different kind of attention — a willingness to look without preconception, to respond to what was actually there rather than to what I expected to find. The New Forest Landscape The New Forest is a l