Surreal Vision in the Cambridgeshire Fenlands

Surreal Vision in the Cambridgeshire Fenlands

The Cambridgeshire Fenlands have a quality that is, at certain times and in certain conditions, genuinely surreal. The flatness of the terrain, the enormous sky, the way the horizon seems to recede as you approach it — these are qualities that resist the ordinary categories of landscape description and that invite a different kind of looking. The Fens are not picturesque; they are strange.

Surrealism and Landscape

The Surrealists were drawn to landscapes that unsettled the familiar — deserts, coastlines, the spaces between the urban and the rural. The Fens have something of this quality: they are a landscape that has been made, rather than found, and the evidence of their making — the dykes, the drains, the pumping stations, the roads that run straight for miles without deviation — gives them an artificial quality that is at odds with their apparent naturalness.

In my photography and painting of the Fenlands, I have been drawn to this quality of strangeness — to the moments when the landscape seems to exceed its own description, when the ordinary becomes uncanny. The tilted telegraph poles, the roads that disappear into the distance, the isolated farmhouses surrounded by flat fields: these are the elements of a landscape that is simultaneously familiar and alien.

Photography and the Surreal

Photography is particularly well suited to capturing the surreal quality of the Fenlands. The camera records what is actually there — the specific quality of the light, the precise geometry of the landscape — and in doing so, it can reveal a strangeness that is invisible to the casual observer. The black and white treatment that I use in my Fenland photography reinforces this quality: it removes the distraction of colour and focuses attention on form, tone, and the relationships between elements.