In the autumn of 2023 I started a 12 month photographic project, in which I intended to document the changing of the seasons by photographing the landscape around my home in a tiny village in the East of England. The first 3 parts of that project are captured here, here and here, and the photographs below capture the time from the end of May until the start of September 2024.
Having lived here for 18 years, and having walked and driven through the woods and farmland that surrounds our house many hundreds of times during those years – and at all times of the year – I was confident that I knew the rhythms of the land, the cycle of growth and decay in the hedgerows and verges, and the timing and details of the farming year. I knew when the fields were ploughed and sown; when the cereal crops would reach peak golden hour photographic gorgeousness; when the mud would give way to baked clay; and when the hedgerows would become heavy with blackberries.
Or so I thought.
2024 turned out to have other ideas.
Spring was incredibly late and cold and wet, which meant that fields that should have been tilled and drilled lay fallow for weeks longer than usual; the mud lingered and lingered and lingered; and summer never really arrived – save for the odd day here and there.
So the photographs that I took in the final quarter of my project were very much not the photographs that I expected to take and were far fewer in number.
This was a huge disappointment to me – and if I am honest, I considered abandoning the project all together as another June day turned out wet and grey and mud-filled. But more than disappointed, I was alarmed. The blurring of the lines between the seasons, the unpredictability of the weather and its frequent extremes can only be attributed to climate change. Is what I have captured this year in my tiny corner of England a turning point? Will the seasons and rhythms ever be the same again? I don’t know – but you can bet I’ll be hoping; and watching ever more closely the hedgerows and the fields and the mud in 2025 and beyond.
