For seven years, John Volynchook moved through the British countryside by bicycle and on foot to photograph places marked for shale gas extraction. The resulting book, Faultlines, published by GOST Books in 2024, gathers images made between 2015 and 2021 in landscapes that sit within onshore oil and gas licence blocks. These are not panoramic denunciations but patient, fragmented records—fields, roads, edges of towns—that acquire weight through accumulation. Volynchook’s method was grounded in conversation: stories gathered from people he met along the way inform the sequence, though the photographs never reduce those encounters to illustration.

The book’s title is precise. Faultlines can be geological, but they are also social and political, running through communities asked to accept industrial change on their doorstep. Volynchook’s attention to the ordinary textures of these places—their uneven development, their proximity to infrastructure—keeps the work from becoming a simple record of protest. Instead, it asks how a landscape is known when its future is contested. The photographs are quiet, but their quiet is not neutral; it is the quiet of listening closely.

The book is an 88-page hardback. The structure rewards repeated looking: individual images may seem unassuming, but the sequencing builds a cumulative sense of place under pressure. The work remains an extended engagement with a specific national argument, attentive to both conversation and composition.