These photographs were made across the same summer as What the Heat Sheds, Fever in the River and this time away from the city and river, in fields left dry and harvested early by weeks of extreme heat. The ground itself had become a kind of record, furrows and tyre tracks reading almost like something scored into the land rather than simply worked into it. Then, here and there, a tree. Sometimes standing alone in the middle of an emptied field, sometimes newly planted and still caged against the wind, holding its own small patch of green in ground that had given up all of it. What began as a record of drought became a record of what the drought had not managed to take.

I kept the same treatment as the rest of this work, pushing the exposed land toward white and gold and letting the shadow crush toward black. Wherever life had held on, a tree, a patch of grass, young saplings still fenced against the deer, I let the colour stay, since it was doing something the surrounding ground was not, holding rather than yielding. The photographs do not attempt to represent the drought directly. They record what it left behind and what, here and there, refused to go with it.