Fenland Farm Buildings at Hale Fen — Landscape Photography

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 distance and the particular quality of Fenland light.

Photography and the Fenland Vernacular

These photographs were made as part of an ongoing engagement with the Fenland landscape — an attempt to record the vernacular architecture of the region before it changes further. The farm buildings of the Fens are not picturesque in any conventional sense; they resist the romantic. What they offer instead is a kind of austere honesty: structures built for purpose, shaped by the demands of a difficult and particular environment.

The black and white treatment reinforces this quality. Colour, in the Fens, can be distracting — the eye is drawn to the sky, to the water, to the seasonal changes in the fields. In monochrome, the structural relationships become clearer: the geometry of the buildings against the horizontal of the land, the weight of the sky above, the intervals of space between one form and the next.

The Fens as Subject

The Fenlands have been a sustained subject in both my photography and my painting. There is something about this landscape that resists easy description — its flatness, its exposure, its strange combination of the agricultural and the elemental. The farm buildings are part of this: evidence of human presence in a landscape that seems, at times, indifferent to it.