Fenland Photography — A Book Cover Commission

I was recently contacted by a book publisher looking for a suitable image for the front cover of a new title. He was searching for something dark and mysterious to represent the Fenlands — and had come across my photography project completed during the lockdown period.

'Cambridgeshire Fenlands' Photography by: Peter Corr

The Fenland Photography Project

Followers of this blog may recall the project I completed during lockdown: a series of black and white photographs of the Cambridgeshire Fenland landscape, focusing on the archetypal topography of dykes and rivers, tilted telegraph poles, uneven roads disappearing into the far distance, and semi-derelict abandoned houses. The Fenlands have a quality that is difficult to describe — flat, exposed, and strangely melancholic — and the black and white medium seemed the right way to approach it.

'Debris' by Andrew Humphrey

The book is called 'Debris', by Andrew Humphrey, published by HeadShotPress. The publisher chose the image of a farmhouse — a photograph taken at Ten Mile Bank, just off the road to Ramsey. The house no longer exists, having been replaced by a new building on the same footprint. In 'Debris', I understand that the dilapidated house serves as a metaphor for the emotional deterioration of one of the characters, as well as functioning as a literal location within the narrative.

Andrew Humphrey has been described as East Anglia's laureate of loss and alienation. His short fiction has appeared in Crimewave, Midnight Street, Black Static, and The Third Alternative.

'Debris' Book by Andrew Humphrew

'A Punch to the Heart' by Andrew Humphrey

There is a follow-up collection of short stories by Andrew titled 'A Punch to the Heart', and a second photograph — a misty, dark, and isolated Fenland road — has been chosen for that cover. The Cambridge Fenlands feel like a natural setting for the kind of psychological intensity Andrew's writing explores: the landscape's flatness and exposure create a particular kind of unease that translates well into fiction.

I find it genuinely interesting to see how photographs made in one context — as part of a personal landscape project — can take on new meaning when placed in dialogue with a literary work. The images were not made with book covers in mind, but the fit feels right.

'Fenland Road' Photography by Peter Corr

'Fenland' — A Photography Book by Peter Corr

The lockdown photography project was eventually compiled into a book, 'Fenland', which brings together the full series of black and white images made across the Cambridgeshire landscape during that period. The project was an opportunity to look closely at a landscape I know well but rarely photograph — and to consider what the camera can do with a terrain that resists the picturesque and rewards sustained attention.

'A Punch To The Heart' by Andrew Humphrey