Paul Hart is an exceptionally fine English nature photographer. He finds haunting, poetic images in neglected corners of small towns and the countryside. Many of the images convey a sense of desolation and paralysis, and the partial capture of nature in industrial farm landscapes.
Shown above is a striking image from his series ‘Truncated’ about a plantation in Derbyshire. Below are images from his haunting fenland series, taken in the Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire fens.
The writer Isabelle Bonnet wrote this about his work in 2020:
Hart’s landscapes create a dialogue between art and document, lyricism and storytelling, the sublime and the ordinary. Almost everywhere, rectilinear and regular shapes unfold, impeccably drawn furrows responding to rows of trees, industrial constructions and metal structures. Vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines multiply across the pages, occasionally disrupted by an incongruous curve. They remind us that man’s ambitions for the domination and exploitation of nature and all things living have been fulfilled, as once dreamed of by Descartes, who wished to ‘render ourselves […] the lords and possessors of nature’. These divided, squared and geometrical landscapes look as though caught in a cage – hence the impression of immobility or near-paralysis they convey. No movement animates this nature morte, no bird awakens these low and heavy skies and endless horizons…
