'Fenland' — A Photography Book

'Fenland' — A Photography Book

'Fenland' is a photography book documenting the Cambridgeshire Fenland landscape — a body of work made over several years, with the majority of the photographs taken during the winter of 2020/21. The book brings together black and white images of the Fenland's characteristic topography: dykes and rivers, tilted telegraph poles, uneven roads disappearing into the distance, and the isolated farmhouses and farm buildings that punctuate the flat terrain.

The Project

The Fenland photography project grew out of a sustained engagement with the landscape immediately around my home in Ely. The Fens are not a landscape that yields easily to the camera — their flatness and apparent featurelessness can make them seem unphotographable — but they reward patient attention. The photographs in 'Fenland' are an attempt to find the visual interest that lies within this apparently simple landscape: the quality of the light, the geometry of the drainage system, the relationship between the built and the natural.

The black and white treatment was a deliberate choice. Colour, in the Fens, can be distracting — the eye is drawn to the sky, to the seasonal changes in the fields, to the particular greens and browns of the vegetation. In monochrome, the structural relationships become clearer, and the landscape's essential character — its flatness, its exposure, its strange combination of the agricultural and the elemental — is more directly apparent.

The Book

The book was designed to present the photographs in a sequence that reflects the experience of moving through the landscape — not a geographical journey, but an atmospheric one, moving between different qualities of light and weather, different times of day and season. The photographs were exhibited at the 'Beyond the Image' photographers gallery in Suffolk in 2021, and the book was published to accompany that exhibition.