Louis Rogers

Earlier in the month we walked from Littleport to Ely, as if down a vanishing point. There was only the river, trenched into a choppy stripe of dark silver, the fields of black earth stretching forever on either side of it, the low winter sun glaring into us unobstructed. Everything flat and managed and quivering with its emptiness. I maintain that this weird featurelessness was what made me mess up the map reading. I took some photos while we were there on film I had found at home – a discontinued stock called Kodak Plus-X 125. The roll had expired the year I was born; it was 21 years out of date. The negative that was finally developed from it had deteriorated a little, but I was surprised by how clearly the images came out, in eerie, high contrast black and white. Phragmites reeds are found across East Anglia. If you look at them long enough in that sheer uninterrupted sunlight they start to look like a negative: the brightness of the contrast flickers between visual senses. It’s strange to want to describe something natural as unnatural. Perhaps the fens felt super-natural, as in, intensely natural, more natural than the word’s usual associations can hold. [...]