With his deep connection to the English landscape, photographic images are ‘unmistakably Hatfull’

‘Quietly Borrowed’, an exhibition of photographs by David Hatfull at Arlington Arts until September 30. Review by LIN WILKINSON

Arlington Arts is hosting a large and impressive collection of new black and white photographs by David Hatfull, a professional photographer, a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and a former Kodak and Canon Photographer of the Year.

All fine photographers have a unique eye, and Hatfull combines this with penetrating observation and a powerful sense of composition and intention. There is also a quietness, a subtlety and an essential humanity to his photographs, along with a deep connection to the English landscape. These images are unmistakably Hatfull.

All were taken on film using traditional cameras of varying formats, and processed and printed using traditional darkroom techniques. This intensely personal craft is reflected in all the prints, which have a sense of materiality and of the photographer’s hand and intellect.

By definition, all serious landscape photographers possess the patience to find their locations, then wait in all weathers and seasons until the light and their chosen compositional elements coalesce. Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ is as important in landscape photography as in photojournalism.

Hatfull has a particular interest in dramatically lit landscapes, Ansel Adams’ legacy perhaps an early influence, with Holkham Beach a favourite motif. There’s a glorious minimal composition of just three linear elements: the sea, a vast empty beach, and out-of-focus foreground shadow. Another image sees sky and ridged sand caught in stunning light. Brilliant light, too, in ‘Wharram Percy’, with its roofless, ruined church, and in ‘Brent Tor Church’, perched high, like a medieval hill fort, against dramatic clouds.

A superb technician, Hatfull’s skilful use of depth of field and differential focus are demonstrated in ‘Burnham Overy’, with its panoramic format, blurred foreground grasses and pin-sharp windmill on the horizon: quintessentially Norfolk.

Some photographs consist of single, non-contextualised motifs: a sycamore leaf in ice recalls Minor White’s quietly minimal images of the 1970s. Elsewhere, Hatfull isolates a flattened drinks can, and a ring-pull, against solid-black backgrounds. A single discarded plastic glove on a drain cover is chillingly reminiscent of Covid.

‘July 19th 2022’ is a vertical study of clouds, bringing to mind the work of Alfred Stieglitz. There’s a series of single trees, shot in differing light and all seasons, and sometimes the subject of an image is almost marginal, as the feather caught on a tree trunk.

Several compositions are built round the natural circles of dew ponds: in ‘Pewsey Downs’ in summer, and in ‘Wolfscote Hill, the White Peak’, in deep snow. In an image of Hartingdon, a line of sheep both rim the dewpond and are reflected in it.

There’s masterly use of shutter speed to capture the viscous flow of water over rocks in ‘River Dovedale’, and in ‘Wool Pack 1 and 2, Kinder Scout’, Hatfull has selected configurations of monumental rocks to create ‘photographic sculptures’, echoing Henry Moore’s work. Three linked images of Silbury Hill show how different photographs can be made using the same elements but shot from different viewpoints and in different light.

There are very few human figures. A man mows a churchyard ̶- a loose, oblique, but effective image; participants in the Greenham Park Run form a central, moving horizontal across the photograph. Two hikers on Hadrian’s Wall, on either side of a central tree, are incidental to the landscape, but essential to the composition.

‘Sunflowers, Wash Common’ shows you don’t have to travel to get good photographs. Though this is a black and white image, you ‘feel’ the heat’ and ‘see’ the colour.

The show (free entry) runs until Saturday 30 September (Mon-Fri 10am-5pm; last booking slot 4pm).