The Fens is a region of reclaimed marshland in eastern England, which is now one of the richest arable areas in the UK. Paul Hart has been photographing this landscape of agribusiness for over ten years. DRAINED (2016-2017) is the second part in a three part series on the region and concentrates on an area of land which lies barely above sea level located a few miles from The Wash. The series is comprised of 46 photographs made by Hart as silver gelatin prints. DRAINED was published in 2018 by Dewi Lewis with an essay by Francis Hodgson and in the same year Hart was awarded the inaugural Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize for the series. Work from DRAINED resides in a number of important collections including the V&A and MoMA Library Collections.
“Paul Hart is a photographer interested in the slow harvesting of hidden truth from the ordinary places that most of us pass by. He works in an unfashionable idiom with slow cumbrous equipment (not just old-fashioned analogue photography, but medium format analogue photography, slower still) in an unfashionable place. He seeks to find the bits of the land that speak their stories, and to transmit their importance in views in which, typically, the absolute lack of melodrama demands slow looking and brings slow revelation. Hart’s placid, formally peaceful landscape is pregnant with stories that lurk in the mud or the mist. His magic lies in soliciting from his viewers the same half-historical, half-romantic reaction to ploughed fields and straight drainage ditches as he has to them himself.”
— Francis Hodgson
