A photographic exploration of The Old Birmingham Main Line Canal known locally as ‘The Cut’.

Cut - verb: cut; 3rd person present: cuts; past tense: cut; past participle: cut; gerund or present participle: cutting – make an opening, incision, or wound in (something) with a sharp-edged tool or object. synonyms: gash, slash, lacerate, slit, pierce, penetrate, wound, injure; informal – ignore or refuse to recognise – synonyms:snub, ignore, shun, give some

The Birmingham Main Lane Canal celebrated a landmark anniversary in 2018. In the 250 years since the first ‘cut’ was made for James Brindley’s Birmingham Main Line Canal, which is at the heart of the British canal network, running from Birmingham through the Black Country to Wolverhampton and beyond.

To mark this anniversary Richard has created a photographic exploration of the network, encouraging the audience to visually discover an environment. Offering a glimpse into an industrial past and reflecting on what impact a modern urban society has on the waterway today.

The images depict a quietness and serenity, the only movement captured is the almost unnoticeable flow of the harnessed and restrained water, in contrast to its complex and chaotic urban surroundings.

The photographs witness and reflect a multifaceted landscape as does the canal itself. They capture a beauty that exists in the tension between nature and the man-made, rebirth and decay and purity and pollution.

These painterly and sometimes abstract images focus on the water itself. Its depth has an undercurrent of a troubled society, a sense of foreboding, signs of urban deterioration leading to a question of what lies beneath. Its reflections present a second view point of what is going on beyond the frame, highlighting symmetry and opening up the environment to nature and the sky.