A boy stares into the remains of a fire during lockdown - Léonie Hampton's best photograph

'Water is there for fish to swim through. Air is there for birds to fly in. But we have to make fire - and how we go forward with our need is key to our place on Earth'In May 2020, not long after we went into lockdown, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter commissioned me to take photographs responding to its wonderful seed collection. The shots were to accompany a touring exhibition called Seedscapes: Future-Proofing Nature, about global efforts to save plants from extinction.Throughout the following summer and autumn, I took pictures that became the series A Language of Seeds. I'm lucky enough to live on the edge of Dartmoor, where my husband has created a beautiful vegetable garden. The commission was an opportunity to meditate on that: every day, I would try to find something new. It encouraged me to think about my immediate environment in a wider context, in political terms, rather than just the idea of a garden being something you use to escape from the world. Continue reading...