For more than two decades, Harry Cory Wright has steadily cemented a significant position in the pantheon of landscape photography. Several solo exhibitions at Eleven Fine Art have garnered the praise of critics and collectors alike; Rachel Campbell-Johnston noted that: “These are not images to stand back and stare at. They are landscapes to step into. They ground you as you look.”

To date his work has largely focused on the British countryside and especially Norfolk where he lives, with its particular vistas looking north across sandflats and sea to sky. In the course of 2024, a dialogue between Harry and GBS Fine Art (with the blessing of his long-time dealer Eleven) led to a trip to Nantucket, one of the easternmost points of the continental US. Here he was implicitly drawn to look east back towards Europe. While it may be a natural instinct to face the rising sun, on a metaphysical level it harnessed the centuries of human movement back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, from the Vikings and later the Portuguese in their quest for cod, to the early settlers with their own quest for some freedom of conscience and religious practice, to the great whaling fleets of the nineteenth century.

Cory Wright has always used a large format (8”” x 10”) analogue plate camera; “…it has an almost magical capacity to record much more than I can see.” And while the resulting detail is astonishing, it equally seems to have captured some sense of the innate nostalgia experienced by generations of sailors and travellers between the two continents. Moreover, it lends itself to presentation at scale, enabling the viewer to do as suggested by Cambell- Johnston, to literally step into the image and become as one with the landscape.