Robert Darch’s Photo Book Depicts A Dark Dystopian Future

Darch takes the eerie fog-cloaked landscape inhabited by McCarthy’s characters and recasts it through his lens. “The Moor depicts a fictionalised dystopian future situated on the bleak moorland landscapes of Dartmoor”, he explains. “Drawing on childhood memories of Dartmoor alongside influences from contemporary culture, the narrative references local and universal mythology to give context, but suggests something altogether more unknown.” The series is dark, proposing a future dystopia through images of the present. Darch’s lens shifts from vertiginous, dark forest, to open grass plains, makeshift dwellings and figures illuminated and distorted by light. The ferocity of nature is present too, its wildness unbound as Darch frames the environment and society on the point of collapse. “Shifting between pseudo-documentary and constructed photography”, Darch explains, “The Moor blurs that liminal space between fiction and reality.”