Reclaimed

Reclaimed is the closing volume of Paul Hart's trilogy about the Fens, a low, marshy region in eastern England that was drained over centuries to create some of the country's richest farmland. The earlier parts, Farmed (2016) and Drained (2018), won several international awards. In 2018 the series received the inaugural Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize (Austria/UK), and in 2019 it was shortlisted for the Hariban Award (Japan).

The Fens are shaped by intensive agribusiness and monoculture, by waves of migration, and by a long struggle to reclaim land from the sea. Hart, who has photographed the area for more than a decade, uses his images to explore how people and the natural world affect each other, and to ask what we owe to land that we have remade and continue to care for.

Hart works only with analogue film and traditional darkroom methods. He turns attention toward small details within familiar views, and his documentary approach lets the flat, overlooked scenery speak for itself, finding a quiet beauty in land rarely judged for its artistic value.

The book opens with an introductory essay by the French curator and writer Isabelle Bonnet, who reads the work as a meeting of art and document, lyricism and storytelling. She describes ruled fields, rows of trees, industrial structures and vast grey skies, and suggests that the exhausted Fens stand as a metaphor for what humanity does to itself.