The Cambridgeshire Fenlands — Winter 2020/21

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 systematically.

The Lockdown Photographs

The photographs made during the winter of 2020/21 form the core of my Fenland photography project. They were made on foot, within the limited radius that the lockdown restrictions permitted, and they reflect the particular quality of the landscape in that season: the bare fields, the low light, the absence of the usual human activity that animates the landscape in other seasons.

The Fens in winter have a quality of exposure that is unlike any other season. The crops are gone, the trees are bare, and the landscape is reduced to its essential elements: the flat fields, the dykes and drains, the enormous sky. It is a landscape that demands a particular kind of attention — patient, unhurried, willing to find interest in the apparently featureless.

The Photography Project

The photographs from this period were eventually published as a book, 'Fenland', and exhibited at the 'Beyond the Image' photographers gallery in Suffolk in 2021. The project was not conceived as documentary in intent — I was drawn to the aesthetic qualities of the landscape rather than its social or political dimensions — but in retrospect, the photographs carry something of the particular atmosphere of that winter: the stillness, the isolation, and the strange beauty of a landscape seen without the usual distractions.