Paul Hart is interested in our relationship with the landscape from both a cultural and an environmental perspective. His work examines human-altered topography and our occupation and stewardship of the land, usually concentrating on one specific geographical region where he photographs intensively over a number of years. He works primarily with the black and white analogue process, using large and medium format film cameras, and his practice involves all aspects of the photographic process from the negative through to the gelatin silver print.
Hart studied at the London College of Printing (UK) and Nottingham Trent University (UK) graduating in 1988 with a BA (Hons) in Photography. He has concentrated on long-term personal projects for the past twenty years and has exhibited widely at venues such as ; The Austrian Cultural Forum London, The Royal Academy of Arts, The Photographers’ Gallery and the Royal Photographic Society. His prints and books reside in major collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, The MoMA Library Collection and the Martin Parr Foundation Library. He has received a number of international awards ; in 2018/19 he was granted the inaugural Wolf Suschitzky Prize (UK/Austria) and was shortlisted for the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Award (Latvia) and the HARIBAN Award (Japan).
Hart has published four critically acclaimed monographs with Dewi Lewis Publishing. His first book TRUNCATED(2009) is now out of print. In 2020 he concluded the Fenland Trilogy, a ten year project on an area of reclaimed marshland in the East of England, published as stand-alone monographs ; FARMED (2016), DRAINED (2018) and RECLAIMED (2020).