Paul Hart
Paul Hart b.1961 explores our relationship to land in both a humanistic and socio-topographical sense. He works primarily with the black and white analogue process and is one of a diminishing number of photographers whose practice involves all aspects of the photographic process from the negative through to the print. He has exhibited widely and his most recent series of works exploring the Fen landscapes of Eastern England have been published as award winning photo books with Dewi Lewis Publishing (Farmed, Drained, Reclaimed). In 2018 Hart won the inaugural Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize/Residency (London/Vienna) and was shortlisted for the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Award (Daugavpils) and in 2019 was shortlisted for the HARIBAN Award (Tokyo). His work resides in important collections including the V&A Museum (London), the Ivor Braka Collection (London), the MoMA Library Collection (NYC) and the Martin Parr Foundation Library (Bristol, UK).
“When I first re-established my dark room around 20 years ago, plants were one of the first subjects I explored. I was pushing to get the kind of detail I admired in works by other photographers such as Karl Blossfeldt (d.1932) or Ron van Dongen (b. 1961) – you need long exposure time to get that detail which was quite a challenge in a natural environment! I learnt a lot through studying the plants which definitely influenced the texture and graphic detail of the later forestry studies that became the TRUNCATED series.”
