The aircraft fly low over where I live in the Fens. The flat landscape allows for a sustained view of the aircraft that have increasingly, in these last few years, filled the sky with the sound of war. US military transport planes, technologically sublime in their scale and their out of placeness in this geography previously without the types of flight paths associated with large cities, fly in from North America to land at nearby RAF Mildenhall, a geographical staging post for what I assume are their journeys on to Ukraine and the Middle East. I time them sometimes, every twenty minutes from early morning on some days, and think of their night journeys over the Atlantic and how this must echo a previous era when American personnel and arms had made their way into the various de-facto US bases in Norfolk and Suffolk. Noisier still are the F-35 fighters conducting their increasingly intense training sorties from the other major airbase at nearby Lakenheath.
Norfolk is often listed as one of the most populous counties in the UK for birdlife and yet even here, in spite of my frequent early morning visits to the Snettisham Spectacular on the North Norfolk coast and the millions of birds that react to the incoming tide by flying up in to the sky all at once, there is a dramatic decline in all species. Bird song punctuates the still dark early morning before I even realise I am awake, before the sound of aircraft begin to arrive once more on their descent over this landscape and effectively obliterate the delicate sounds of birdsong that not long ago went unchallenged.
This competition, between these aircraft flying in to feed this increasingly conflictual age of ours and the birdsong of the Fens feels symbolic somehow: the two most pressing twenty-first century entities, war and nature, dancing around each other vying for our attention. All I can think to do is to document them both and place the resultant photographs side by side as a kind of witnessing, a montage or collage of the placing of two elements side by side to create a third meaning, as the classic description of montage goes. But what this third meaning might be alludes me at this time. It remains an open question.
Bird Watching in Norfolk dates from 2022 and is a continuing body of work.