Doggerland (Stage 3)

Presented final images Photographing the un-photographable was always going to be a challenge for any photographer. But having eliminated anything digital and anything colour from my approach, I began to strip back further by returning to film and darkroom processes and eventually found that pinhole photography was the ideal medium to give life to my imagined landscapes of Doggerland. Using rudimentary coffee tin cameras and shoe boxes with a crude hole as the lens, the simple means of capturing images in exposures of between 2 – 4 minutes onto photographic film seemed well-suited to the need to frame these imagined landscapes in a way that suggested their existence as hazy and indistinct traces of a landscape residing deep inside our collective memory. Views of ordinary, unremarkable marshland, heath or forest edge were captured around various locations in Norfolk and Suffolk as many of those same landscape features existed at the time. My images for Doggerland present fuzzy fragments before they vanish forever; as if witnessed for the briefest moment through a wormhole in time, snatching a tiny splinter of something ancient but lost to the sea in an event mirroring our 21st century climate change events and the effects they have on the landscape and movement of people in search of survival and a better life.