DRAINED
2016 - 2017
“There shall be
in that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware...”
Sea Bank
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 photographed this landscape of agribusiness for over tens years. DRAINED is the second part of Hart’s trilogy on the region. The series was published in 2018 by Dewi Lewis Publishing with an essay by Francis Hodgson and in the same year Hart was awarded the inaugural Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize. Prints from the series reside in a number of important collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Hyman Collection and the MoMA Library Collection. DRAINED has been internationally exhibited and a second edition of the publication was printed in 2020.
EXHIBITION PRINTS
DRAINED comprises 46 pictures available in limited editions :
Silver gelatin prints
Image sizes up to : 18 x 18 in / 46 x 46cm
Large-scale fibre based baryta prints :
40 x 40 in / 102 x 102 cm
Printed by Paul Hart
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
This Pleasant Land | Rosalind Jana (Hoxton Mini Press) 2022
Another County | Gerry Badger (Thames & Hudson/MPF) 2022
Monograph
DRAINED | Dewi Lewis Publishing
First published 2018 | reprinted 2020
Essay : Picturing the Polder by Francis Hodgson
“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.”