The introduction to photographer Paul Hart’s latest book, Fragile, features a poem by American poet Helene Johnson (1906-1995). Titled Trees at Night, it includes descriptions such as ‘lacy arms’, ‘stilly sleeping lake’, ‘torn webs of shadows’ and ‘trembling beauty’. As you leaf through the 51 richly detailed black & white plates in the publication, these words – and more – echo time and time again. The images are imbued with an all-encompassing sense of stillness, as seen in the pin-sharp reflections of trees in water, the electricity pylons that dissolve into the mist-engulfed distance, and the vanishing points of reed-flanked trenches and footpaths through fields.
is Hart’s fifth monograph, and follows his Fenland Trilogy, which was made up of , and . All three are studies of the Fens, the region covering Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and parts of Norfolk and Suffolk that is characterised by flatness, farming and fertile land. takes a step sideways from these, and while it still features the big skies, solitary trees
