Jem Southam ~ From Red River to the River Winter

I'm going to introduce gem who is I think recognize that one as one of the greatest photographic artists we have in the UK your net you're never gonna you're never going to agree to that are you and he's gonna take you through several bodies of his work just this afternoon and to try and use those as a way of illustrating his approach to photography his ethos in photography and I think it will be a fascinating and really eye-opening thing for for lots of you for me the great tragedy about James work is it doesn't translate well into a book or into images on the net it really needs to be seen as a print and and that is that that's when you can understand what it's about which sadly means that unless you get the chance to see his work as an exhibition and there are a couple of his prints out the front you're probably not going to appreciate the depth of what he's doing I try with books they're not big enough where's David bring triple chi big book yeah so without further ado Jim soften okay together later and and and thank you very very much for the invitation to come and speak here and come up to him and with Penrith and share this fascinating two to two days I've had a great time so far one of the things that I love about sort of getting older as a photographer is that I thought at first why I really love photography was because I like going out making pictures which is obviously the case but over the last 5-10 years I've realized that one of the things I really love about it is that it introduced me to some really wonderful people and being meeting people here these opportunities are just just great fantastic talk from Raphael I've lots and lots of things III found really interesting about what he said and there was a lot of congruence between what I'm going to say and what he said and and I'm gonna be using some of the same kind of phrases in terms but there was one point that I fundamentally disagree with him about and that is that I am absolutely passionate about the Phatak photographic process the media absolutely from when I first started working and I'm sure many of you will share this light physics chemistry what happens when these little boxes when Fox twelve but God is little boxes and coated bits of paper and stack them and started putting them in places and when there's the whole exploration of what what photography is and what it can do I find absolutely kind of wonderful so that's my starting point the very simple fact I just like going out with a little box and sticking it somewhere in the world and just seeing what happens that's that's what I love doing so I Rock Falls with a pond threw about that's relatively straightforward that's largely what I'm going to be talking about a clamor of voices maybe not so so I'm going to just briefly try and introduce that so we we've heard a little bit about the sublime romanticism and goodness knows what Caspar David Friedrich was thinking about when he was painting this picture between 1817 and 1818 he was a bit of a religious mystic apparently and also a depressive but but but subsequent generations and and and and for me today I want to think about us arson I mean you know this is that wander above the mist but really this is all of us this is mankind we've cried now to the top of Olympus we join the gods or we now are the gods looking down at the world and contemplating the world and our place within it from the middle of the the 18th century the idea of creation as something provided for us by a divine hand was steadily or had been steadily eroded and in its place views of the world narratives constructs of the world coming out of over a questioning empiricism observation reasoning what we call the Age of Enlightenment building kind of new narratives that explained the world in our position and and those narratives have come out of the Natural Sciences but they also come out at the humanities and they come out of kind of philosophy and there is this room yes for still for the divine the spiritual but also going back to David's talk this morning also the fact that we were human animals is an awful lot embedded in us that's to do with the sort of two million year or so evolution of of us of of animals and as we are sort of standing and looking out of the world this is my kind of you know approach anyway this is where I come from when we open our eyes and look at the world we are absolutely flooded our minds are absolutely flooded by what I call a clamor of voices these sort of narratives so would they come to us as we're growing up first from our parents and from our families through the processes of Education through the all the films that we ever looked at all the pictures books we've ever looked at all the posters all the paintings all the novels all the histories and so a few years ago I started I'm not going to do it to you today occasionally giving talks where I would sort of list of undergraduate students some of the big influences in my life and I used to start off with Thomas the Tank Engine I was shocked to realize when I had kids and I started rereading Thomas the Tank Engine and Noddy books how powerful the imagery was that I'd been sort of absorbing through all those early early years and it's still in there it's still feeding my imagination and and and so what I find absolutely fascinating is to make work that allows me to sort of dwell on this clamor of voices that are coming coming through me a lot of it the universality that Raphael was talking about but each one of us is is just sort of lives a life full of these whoops this is this jumping thing but to put that in a slightly different way and come at that from a slightly different direction I'm just going to use this picture this is the one cut picture from Cumbria that I'm going to show you I made a piece of work along the cambrian coast between about 2005 and 2008 and here I was standing on a slag heap north of Barrow with a man called nickel free an art historian wonderful art historian who teaches at Nottingham University and he's incredibly well informed about the history of English landscape and and pay literature and he stood there with me he said oh that's Blackcomb isn't it and I said yeah yeah and he said well you know that Wordsworth poem from Blackcomb which I didn't so that evening we we sort of went out and we dug out this fantastic Titleist listen to this written with a slate pencil on a stone on the side of the mountain of Blackcomb and the reason he points her words with warped up black but the thing that we really fascinated by is the bit at the top of the second page where he says know if thou grudge not to prolong thy rest that on the summit with it thou art bound a Geographic laborer pitched his tent with books supplied and instruments of art to measure height and distance lonely task week after week so Wordsworth came across a very very early cartographer working on the top of Blackcomb and he incorporated this sort of narrative into this poem and what Nick all free and I found so fascinating about this was that we thought about this idea of being a Geographic laborer but all of us really are Geographic laborers be we art historians or or painters or geographers or physical geographers or or whatever and we're all working away we're beavering away in our own tiny little ways asking our own questions working with our own kind of methods but we're all fascinated by this vast vast sort of topic which is the earth it's you know and our understanding of being here so I liken myself to being a I love this idea of being just a geographic laborer a very kind of democratic proletarian sort of role so so I come to to landscape thinking along these lines I'm going to show you some bodies of work now to try and open up some of this and unlike some of the the the speakers I'm not going to dwell a lot on individual pictures but sort of go go through them I'm going to show a lot of a lot of pictures so this is the little series called the garden it's my garden we moved into this house in about 1994 I think when my second child was born and one day about a year later I came down to breakfast and looked out the window and just felt oh I must get my camera so this is shot on a ternary camera get the camera and just made this picture looking out the window of the garden and made a contact prints suck it on the wall and about a year later or nine months later I came down earth or I must do this again and I took another picture and this is how I make work I very rarely sort of set off with a wither with with it with the direct sense of purpose I basically fix on sites what I call sites or places and I make kind of prolonged studies over sometimes a year sometimes two years this is an 18-year piece of work I finished it last year I just decided to put it to bed for a reason which I'll explain a bit later on I've never shown it I've got no plans to show it but it's been an absolutely engrossing piece of piece of work so I fixed on a site and I photograph it go back and back about there's no pattern there's no rhythm there's no plan I don't go back in each month it's it's quite accidental how often I repeat it the sites vary in size enormous ly between the coast of Cumbria which I was describing to you just now and there's a garden some of them are a bit smaller even so I begin to what I call unpack the site what's going on here it's just a garden well it's not just a garden is it first of all it's a sort of a model of a paradisiacal space it's a wall protected space in which one can consorted nurture and look after a family it's a Victorian garden it was before that and an orchard providing food for the the citizens of the city of Exeter about a mile away but now it's a twenty or twenty first century garden and I'm looking out the window and I'm thinking about the fact that I cursed his bloody garden because the mortgage I had to take home to buy the garden is just continuously I'm doing the washing-up tsa's just by the sink bearing down on my on my on my imagination my wife and I both come from middle-class families we wanted a nice big garden and for 15 years you know it was a real it was a real real burden but it's also a place where for instance I think about my relationship with my parents who were both gone by the time this work was started my mother who was very keen on with plants and gardens my father was an ornithologist all very clean of birds so that one of the things I did with this garden is I had feeders and bird feeder and tried to encourage all sorts of different sort of birds into the garden I tried to you know grow plants the best I best I could but it it's it's also something where I'm using on the fact that the modern garden has been completely transformed for instance by garden centers you know the garden center which 2025 years old has radically radically altered what gardens have become in Britain over the last few years so you know kind of furniture and all these sort of things are are transformed so something about modern culture and society but really fundamentally one of the things that's been fascinating to explore making these pictures two things really whoops be jumping was first of all that I had this little theory and not just mine that basically anywhere on earth every site everywhere we go would be where we put our foot down is a contested space there's nowhere that isn't contested so even in a little place like this which is a protected Haven one has conflict it's not just a sort of a beautiful calm and nurturing place so to give you an example when we moved into the house I have about a year or two later the neighbor came around the man living on the on the right hand side a man called mr. cross Derek cross he came around to Jim could have a chat with you a minute and I said sure what's the matter and he said um your kids and I said yeah and he said that bloody trampoline he said every time they bounce on the trampoline they're going hello mr. cross I mean simply you know can you please put up a piece of trellising so the trellising is there explicitly to you know protect the neighbor on the other side came around about a year or two later and said look this tree this big tree here doesn't at this point my one uses this big tree on the ledge so I want it down you know we're having problems with the wall and I said I'm not cutting that down and she said why not and I said well because it's my tree and anyway it's going to spoil the composition of my health set of pictures if I take that tree down you know and also even more importantly than that it's a key place where the birds come in and I bring the birds in it's part of the feeding kind of mechanism in the garden and you know complicated relationships but but I'm sorry I don't know why this keeps popping but you know we had Badgers in the garden about four or five years ago first badger appeared right in the middle of the city and I thought we didn't see it but we saw signs of the batches our first reaction was this is actually wonderful I would happily kill the thing now it just digs and digs and digs and digs holes in our garden we feed the birds we we load the neighbors cats we it's just an endless sense of struggle I have ideas about what I want to do my wife has ideas about what I want to do you know so any any way that a contested sight but something else also very familiar poignant and a lot of you know I like the idea of not to put a lot of pathos into the work suddenly the swings gone we have five six years into this my kids are growing up the whole thing becomes a portrait or of an autobiographical space where we're narratives are unfolding and so on so there's about I've shot about 50 60 pictures over 18 years maybe more I've never organized them into any any kind of shape but it's been a wonderful and fascinating experience and and and something else that you know it's been very interesting about we should never forget again I sort of slightly disagree with Raphael about this I think photography is about light I think lights are medium you know if a painter paints of a sculptor uses stone we use light and and I think aren't we lucky with the luckiest buggers on earth because what is more wonderful than exploring the unbelievable richness and potency of of of light and atmosphere so each one of these is very much an into the picture look the trees gone it had to come down eventually and also the kids climbing frame has gone down anyway and also a celebration of all sort of you know English whether English atmosphere well of Devon and seasons so that gives you some idea so we're we're hopping a lot didn't me to hop gives you some idea that the garden furniture kind of appears as well about what I call unpacking the site just very quietly looking out at somewhere making pictures the same focal length lens the camera is balanced on top of an upturned washing up Bowl each time I'm not bothered too much about what happens with sort of horizons if the windows wet and rainy then that happens it's all because I love that's about you know that's about what photography is it's just looking and whatever's out there basically you know comes comes onto a piece of comes onto the film so that's that's just trying to give you an explanation so I'm now going to talk about this piece of work I'm not going to go through this in that much detail but I just want to make a point or so to open up this idea of a clamor of voices because this is the first piece of work which I made in Camborne where I was living between 1982 in about 1980 87 and 88 got my first teaching job working part time and for the first time in my life I had I was earning some money and had two or three days a week to actually work and I made this work called the Red River and it's called the Red River because it follows I followed the the little stream that ran through the valley that I was living in which was called the Red River and you can see it here to my new little stream never more than about sort of two meters wide or and a meter and a half sort of deep and it's a tinning stream so the water was used from this this tiny stream for about 250 years to lubricate the crushing of the ore and the residue of the whatever had happened at the end of that crushing process was put back into the river which colored it red completely in a poisonous lethal kind of River no life in there whatsoever a lot of sediment a lot of minerals lot of heavy nasty sort of chemicals this is a place called tacking mill and I spent five years walking up and down this valley thinking about making a piece of work and one of the the sort of very rich areas of practice that sort of my generation have sort of explored photographically is what one might call projects that relate to what we call local distinctiveness lots of people made bodies at work where they explore you know the specifics of a particular area so this started off like that you look at a topographic way making a record of a land escape this is a close-up of the stream itself and what I wanted to do was in a sense push the boundaries of the way I thought about landscape and I made pictures so although I started off with a series of big big views after a while I got a bit frustrated with this I said I'm not really sort of touching the sort of the heart of the core of the lives of the people living in this valley so I in a sense I wanted sort of metaphorically to sort of dive down and swim among the houses and among the small holdings and move in and out and make a series of pictures which built into a sort of a complex structured sequence of pictures but something then else started happening which really excited me I'd never really thought through this and this is where that the talk really sort of in a sense hopefully begins and it was maybe looking at pictures like this so I photographed this is a little farm house about a mile or so from where I was living one evening I just got rather interested in trance by this space I said this you shot on a 5-4 MPP set the camera made a picture and then when I was looking at the first of all-first maybe it's 1st 2nd 3rd 4th time looking at the print I suddenly thought that this is interesting because this picture is beginning to to stir things in my mind and I thought well what is it and then I have this idea of all these stories I'd read as a kid about winter travelers traveling through the night and coming across a building and seeing a light and being led towards it and I thought this is fascinating because this pictures in a sense almost like a cherished just strumming these these these memories just very very subtly and this work became a study of the way that I could allow these these these stories I call them kind of myths really narrative myths to to to emerge out of out of my imagination and out of a relationship to a place so here's another picture which complete accident this I was walking home one evening and once one one piece of one one neglect this is a six seven so this whole work was made moving between six seven and and five four and I just saw this engine house and by some some December's are reason there was a tungsten bulb shining behind I think the water board pumping water out during a drought it's a misty day and because of the peculiarities of color film and color temperature the light had given me this sort of reddish glow and and again I wasn't aware of this when I took the picture I just liked the way that the overall composition was working and but when I looked at the print I thought wow this is amazing because it's just almost as if this engine house has been sort of reef iured and I was brought back to thinking about the sort of descriptions of places like Colebrook ford and so on where the early Industrial Revolution people who went to these places and start describing the language that they would use to describe the noise the Smashing the heat the smell and so on very very evocative and again lodged somewhere deep in my imagination so this picture in a sense starts working on that kind of level a book that I was reading at the time Bunyan I come from a fairly powerful nonconformist family so this kind of narrative was this kind of book was very much embedded in my in my childhood and I was rereading it again and and and realizing how potent was the language and the and and the visual descriptions that that for instance pilgrim was described going through as as as he went on his journey so one of the the most the most rich descriptions in that book relates to his walking through the valley of the shadow of death and-and-and the earth sort of grinding and splitting and cracking and belching and so on and that picture of the mineshaft just had a tiny reference to that as well here's another picture made only about half a mile away from that but that mineshaft and I put these two pictures together because they link up with one of the most powerful set of myths that my work in particular kind of explores which we can see depicted in this painting here this is a picture by a man called William Wilde it's a painting of Manchester dating about 1855 and we've got here the confluence of two unbelievably powerful mythic narratives we got the pastoral going right the way back to Greek and and and Roman Roman times this depiction this couple sort of sitting on the on the bank they're contemplating the industrial sublime and the bringing together of these two narratives is something that's deeply embedded in in in in a lot of my work but not only that and if you if you're struggling to believe me just look at this and here you know this is these two stories being brought together this is the Olympics ceremony I was absolutely amazed at the sort of that the fact that you know they'd come up with this this this idea so these these things are so embedded in us and whenever we're sort of looking at the world or walking through it or making pictures I believe we have the potential to to sort of feed and and work on on these these narratives and to give you an example of quite how powerful some of these are look at this picture here this really shook me up this picture this is a photograph made in a Methodist chapel 50 yards from where I was living in a tiny community there were six houses just on the outside of Campbell on a place called lurk and arrow bloody bleak existence in the mid-1980s I can tell you this is a little offering made by the kids in the farm just above us to celebrate harvest festival this is Harvest Festival in this Methodist chapel about 1984 and this is what they created and what I found so profoundly shocking looking at this was that I knew these kids I live next door to the farm they had a bleak tough experience just a dank dark pit of a place with howling dogs and wet and muddy was ghastly and there were six or seven years old and when they came to create a farm look what they created they created a you know a little little little cottage and there's a little pond in front of it some sort of Arcadian little beautiful space that the where's this come from the you know picture books storybooks the kind of things that they would have been looking at more powerful than the experience of actually just walking out into the yard and living in the yard that they were that they were you know growing up in so the power of these myths in the power of of the way that they actually also influences and I if I had longer I could really relate Iran in the talk I want to expand on that in the most extraordinary ways because I think these stories in these myths have the most amazing influence on the way that we lead our lives not just individually but also socially as well so this is just a few more of these pictures and like a lot of the work that I do in fact almost everything I do when I I do actually like the film book form David I do think the book format works worked pretty well sometimes I like to include text and and images together so when I put this work together it's it's structured around a series of narratives so the first section deals with the idea of an origin myth every culture has an origin myth we have Genesis in the Garden of Eden a forest myth northwestern Europe was covered by dark forests when early humans began to sort of chop down on that still pervades you know Hansel and Gretel or all of this stuff buried deep in US Arcadian myths coming again from some Greek and Roman Raju so each one of these myths and I'd use a piece of text to accompany the pictures so also very much to do with the culture of the place so it's a mixture of place specificity narrative metaphor and and storytelling and this was a very important picture to me I summer for some reason rather fascinated by by this picture when I took it it's the confluence of the stream itself this is the Red River we're about a mile from the river mouth now and another stream coming in which was non-mining and you just see where the two two rivers meet I'm going to come back to this sort of later on and then on the beach this is Godrevy gwyddion and Godrevy you can see the the stained stained sea I was amazed that people used to go swimming in this this water if I went there walking with my dog he would run in the scene he come back and this would last on his fur for about week or two afterwards good snows what people made of made of it as a place to go on holiday I'm gonna leap forward so so that's when I started thinking about the potency of these mythic narratives as I call them and between that that Red River piece of work and the The Rock Falls series I'm going to talk about in a moment I made another piece of work called the raft with carrots which was named after this picture rather bizarrely these were a series of photographs of tiny little weird narratives like this that I found when I was walking mostly around Devon where I now live although this one was in the fans just strange sort of human interventions when one's really not quite sure what's what what's going on but within this series quite unintentionally a whole series of raft images appeared pictures where things were placed on floating floating kind of spaces and I was reading a lot at the time to do with floods and flood mythology and also referencing Jericho's rafter the Medusa and thinking about how a raft is about and as you know being on a raft is about as an object a kind of space that one could possibly be not even sheltered by the sides of a boat but just a sort of flat plank of wood and and and being being completely at the mercy of of the sea because if there are a set of these narratives these mythic narratives that are more powerful than any others they're frequently to do with sort of catastrophe how humans individually and socially deal with the fear of catastrophe so this is a flood image and I was reading a lot about kind of flood mythology one of the things that was really extraordinary was that flood myths are prevalent in the origins of almost every culture on earth something really really interesting where ever you go to sort of Aboriginal or to South America or or whatever flood mythology incredibly kind of powerful why where does it come from we go back to some of our other in in early human experience really sort of seismic traumatic kind of events probably embedded themselves deep deep into a sort of psychosis and if one can in matter so when the when the the you know the Japanese tsunami and the earlier one in the Philippines sort of happened you have these apocalyptic kind of events just imagine how many generations it's going to take for the people of North Eastern Japan to somehow other arrays and forget that you know the experience that they had about two years ago but how these sort of getting to our mind how we deal with catastrophe and the rockfall series were partly motivated by an inquiry into that the the journey into how some of these ideas evolved is rather more complicated than I have time to kind of explain here at the moment but I started photographing these things I call them rock falls some people call them mud slides or whatever for a number of reasons but one of the things that fascinated me about them that was that they were the place where the green swath of the English landscape suddenly and just without sort of notice collapsed and fell in so they were they were the point where the whole myth of the you know the beauty of the sort of grass covered down land or Greenland was suddenly shattered by by a catastrophic kind of event so they interested me from from from that point of view they interested me sculpturally I come from the background a very incident land uphold history of of sculptural interventions in the land and so you know I'm interested in the sculptural forms and I started photographing these in this is in 1994 I've been doing so twenty years I've been photographing rock falls now this is a four-part work and so like the others I'd go back and photograph them repeatedly over a period of time and so what I'm going to show you now is I've selected down made of four pictures these are from about thirty negatives taken over two years so I would go back maybe fifteen or twenty times over a couple of years and so this is just a four-part work and Raphael was talking not long ago about this whole idea of time so these pictures are very much one of the other things very much sort of preoccupied me when I was making these was this idea of how we measure time this idea that some horror that we find ourselves living on earth we don't really know you know we can't remember our birth we don't really know where we come from fortunately we don't know when we are eventually going to to sort of expire that somewhere on earth we we have this idea of our lives that just lived between something and and and kind of nothing and in a series of pictures like this you have for instance the movement of a particular wave these are about 1 or 2 second exposures so you've got a wave moving up a beach seconds you've got the cloud sort of wandering past here so we're talking here about the you know the movement of the the you know the you know seconds really have no cloud minutes moving along you've got the tide line there which comes from a sort of monthly cycle of the moon the tide these pictures taken over about two years base deep down into 200 million years of geological history and so time is sort of elastically sort of stretched out in all sorts of ways within this series so I started making a lot of these small studies and again going back to one of the things that Raphael was was was was talking about was this is very much for me so I started photographing these in 1994 and I first showed them about 6 or 7 years later I'd never shown any of them to anybody I just eventually went to see a galleries - who got who agreed to do a show and one of the things I sort of found very bizarre and I love about this is that I had absolutely realised after about five years of this taking these things while Earth is anybody else going to be the least bit interested in in my preoccupation with these things I had this sort of mild panic attack that I would put on this enormous great big show and everybody would come and see what the I do you know just this is absolutely pointless pointless sort of exercise unfortunately a few people that find them interesting but there we are but but it's you know it's it's it's for me and I've been continuing to do it and I largely do it I started working primarily on the on on the South Devon Coast what's now called the Jurassic Coast and also on holiday on the Oh on the Isle of Wight where I sort of photograph the the them as well and then occasionally this is in in Sussex and this is a place called Seaford head and something rather wonderful happened after that first exhibition which actually in the end went down to Al and a guy came up to me at all at the photographic festival and said I really like your pictures I run a photographic agency in Normandy you must come I want you to come and photograph our our cliffs and I said to him all that that sounds wonderful it's very kind of you to ask but I actually don't travel I only photograph in my immediate sort of location I'm not really interested in going around the world of making kind of pictures and you know thanks thank thanks thanks very much but fortunately he kept persisting and after about two years he eventually persuaded me to sort of go over and he picked me up at room or railway station and drove me to the north Normandy coast and I got out the car and and looked at the cliffs and I ran back said you're on you know we're on this is just absolutely kind of wonderful so I've started photographing in 2005 the Normandy coast and the Normandy coast is is is is wonderful and it's absolutely fascinating and it's laden with rockfall there's an enormous number of Rock Falls but also there the coast is very accessible and the the the you know there's about every four or five miles there are these little valleys I can get down and walk along backwards and forwards and and find them so I've been going there for well eight nine years now and photographing in Normandy but going back to this last picture one of the things that I've studied doing I started realizing this is Sussex this is Normandy it's exactly the same Rock twelve fifteen thousand years ago these two pieces of land were joined and only 15 thousand years it's taken for four you know sixty eighty miles of gap to appear between these two two sites and so that says something else rather wonderful about time because each one of these small Rock Falls might happen you know a meter or two of a year the cliffs are going back but actually it's it's incredibly fast process the speed with which the earth is transforming is is so much faster than we can really get our minds around and there's something about looking at the world through of through a camera that gives you an opportunity to think about it and look at it in ways that one can't in any other way so if I make a picture like this on a 10-8 plate camera I don't blow them up quite this big but blow up a print like this one can actually sort of look at the world and think about the implications of what one's seeing in a way that you can't in any other ways you make a film you've got time if you stand there your brain is and you're moving your head around if you draw it you can't deal with the complexity of all of this and so there's something wonderful and unique about the way that the camera allows us to in a sense look at the world and study it within it within the window within it within a still photograph so I'd be making a work now which is about the the you know joining these two these two pieces of land up and these are just a series of the some of the the Normandy pictures so I will make studies of each of these places I'll go back and make a study of I think I've got a fuel and some of them exist as single pictures so this was I love this place with this rock for when I found it I went back about six months later and it the whole piece of the whole cliff had fallen in so this this this brock fall had disappeared so this is that this is a little serious this is rather fascinating I love this one so this was taken one day in about 2006 and the day later I went down to the beach very unusual I go back a day later and I made another picture whoops and that's the picture a day later and I was just amazed how fast that the beach had actually kind of shifted how much is going on and again however much one has a residual memory of what they was there yesterday you can't quite you know position it so you know the camera gives one an ability to to to do that and then a year later huge rock fall next to it and then about two years after that so I make these small small studies this is still all ongoing haven't resolved this I've been photographing these rock floors for 15 or no more 18 years now and it's still I'm still working out how to bring the whole lot into some form of of resolution there's another one of these series this is a place called vow can't so this is about three years so I'm gonna clue how we're doing for time so whilst I was working on these rockfalls I started developing a couple more smaller series coming from a similar similar sort of fascination with this idea of sculptural spaces and so one series will rivermouth rather fascinating we've seen about six or eight ten pictures of river mouths like this during that during the course of today there's something wonderful when we go back to that picture of the joining the confluence of the two rivers I think there's something really remarkable about where two bodies of water meet really really fascinating kind of space where a river meets the sea or where two rivers meet I find them really fascinating places so there was a series of river mouths and you gain a quiet why I call quite sculptural but I also got very interested in in ponds and again partly from a sculptural point of view so this was a pond him Bamford speak we are talking about Bradford speak earlier on today rather fascinating and weird declivity in the floodplain Banford speak and one of the things that interests me about ponds apart from the sort of the sculptural the presence of them was the sort of the psychological and linguistic response because you say the word palm to people it's a very positive affirmative we like ponds they're good things they're nice things they're positive things that little pond that you couldn't quite see outside the children's farmhouse farm ponds you know they're really really very positive places until you approach them really interesting the closer you get to a pond the more and more very subtly disturbed one is by them at least that's my response to them as well and you know what's going on there rather rather rather fascinating first of all it's a bit like a kid with a puddle you don't know how deep the damn things are so you get closer to a pond this this sort of worry is to sort of you know how is it going to suck you down into the earth American Indians Native American in believe pawns are sort of the eyes that stare up from the earth into into the heavens and that you know that what they see goes down back into the into the earth pawns are frequently places that was sort of sticky and messy and so on we don't like they're nice to consider but not not to go close to so I started sort of making a series of poems what I wanted to do was to make a a series of a sort of a a typological piece where I would study about ten or fifteen pounds each one I wanted elliptical or circular pawns and then create an exhibition which would be just a roomful of about ten individual portraits of pawns I like the idea of doing that this is one at turn on the Sussex Downs digital beacon this was my sort of the perfect model at the kind of pond divers I was I was looking for but then again going back to this idea about where the clamor of voices comes from I'm frequently fascinated to to see if I can I call this the path to a picture I organized an exhibition a few years ago at the V&A titled this which was about tracing the narrative back through the history of the imagination to try and find out what what was sort of setting off the excitement and this is an emerson picture which i've always been very very keen by also a wintery picture where this motif of the pond perhaps first began to sort of enter my my subconscious and develop an interest but one of the ponds that i photographed in that first series was this one here this is a place called opsin pine which is about three or four miles from exeter and it was on the route that my wife and i used to take a cycle trip with on you know on a sunday afternoon and i was always rather fascinated by this one partly because like many photographers we quite like photographing kind of messes and it was just a mess so I stopped one day and took this picture this was in about May 1996 and as I sometimes do I went back and about maybe a month later and I was taking this picture and this guy came up to me and he said what are you doing but I have a big plate camera not many people know quite what they are you know big and a plate camera I'm up on a ladder on a tripod with this thing on a cloth over my head and I'm so I'm taking a picture no no and I said what are you doing and he said when I live in the house next door and the guy who owns this land who's ledee become it was absolute I saw it right in the middle of a little village right absolutely was that it was as far away from the notion of what a village pond should be as you could get dirty messy polluted absolutely so I've got permission to to do it up the guy who owns it has given me permission to transform him and I said to him so what are you planning to do and he described to me the the vision that he had for this pond and as he did so the hairs on the back of my head literally stood up because what he was describing was basically an Arcadian dream he wanted to transform this little space into a Arcadian paradisiacal space so he described how he wanted to create boughs of trees winding paths put little benches so he could watch the setting and the rising of the Sun have places for his ducks have places for his daughters pony and I thought this is incredible because here's me with my interest in the way that these narratives sort of influence us in the way that they come up through us and here's somebody who wants to try and make the world into a space like this so I said to him you you mind if I come along and take pictures every now and again and he said sure so there began a fascinating sort of relationship so I would go maybe five six seven times a year in 1996 I shot ten eggs there was like young kids and working was quite difficult and and I just began to sort of photograph what he was doing so this is December 1996 so he had an idea to build a appear out into the pond so he could have his little boat tied up so he could take his little broening boat around his pond for journeys this is a this is a sort of a diptych so this is taken adorned one morning this is the next picture and he had a hard uphill task this guy because the whole pond was surrounded as you can see here you had a farmer kept all his agricultural stuff but not only that the guy deliberately threw all his waist down into the pond this was absolute attrition this this bloke anyway so he had a tough task so this is how they were intended to be sitting up just a panoramic dip - I rather like the sort of photographic sort of treat of this in that you can see that I took this picture on the right about ten minutes before I took that picture on the left because the Sun has written and so on anyway so I I went back a January and made this diptych and he's begun to cover up the that the you know the earth here and I said to him what that's going on over here you can see if we go back to two pictures you see there's a big shrubbery there and then two pictures later I don't want earth you doing so I didn't want that Bush I said yeah but so he said I just lit this bloody great big bonfire underneath it to get rid of it and it very quickly became apparent that this guy was a bit of a bit of an oddball lovely guy fascinating so he's made he started making a path look through a bower and to give you an idea about sort of the real fascination of this is that he wanted an island in his pond now if we go back to going back through you know the history of English landscape capability Brown and Humphry Repton the development of the sir idealized sort of classical neo-romantic kind of landscapes everybody wanted a big big water space with a little bridge some classical buildings and an island this guy had embedded in his mind that he needed an island so here's his Island and he made his Island out of two wooden crates tied together unto which he he you know bread baskets you know there's bread basket things that people carry tie them together turn them upside down stuck a whole lot of plastic box it bottles underneath to give them buoyancy put plastic bags on top filled them with earth slash them with a with a knife sprinkled grass seeds and the grass grew up and his Ducks had somewhere to kind of roost to make life slightly surreal he had his Island on ropes and every now and again he kind of moved around the pond and also every summer when the grass got heavy the whole thing turned over so so there was this sort of wonderful guy with this dream in this vision and for me this became an allegorical piece it's really the most important piece of work I've ever done this by a long way it's an allegorical piece about sort of an everyman trying to make the world a better place and it's all what we want to do isn't it we just want to leave the world a slightly better place than we came into it and here he was just using the energy of his own hands he didn't use any hybrid technology and his own spirit to try and make the world a better place and the pathos of the fact is of course we all want to do that but we're humans and we're gonna fail so there was this incredible drama sort of going on around it but other things started becoming apparent and that was as I was going out and photographing I met you know local people and they got into conversation with me and asked me what I was doing and I would Tim and they really didn't like this guy he wasn't a popular figure in the village so he had he had a really really really tough tough time of it and gradually I was accruing pictures so for about three years I'm not showing I'm just showing you a few of them for about three years here's my bench appearing and he's got more ducks there and so on suddenly a silo the farmer builds a great big silo there I I followed him and his progress and this was in February 1999 with three just under three years into the project and I took this picture I might have had a conversation with him and I've never seen him to this day he disappeared from the village and I was quite upset I had about 18 or 19 eggs which I really quite liked and I thought this is this was building up to be the most important and interesting piece of work I'd ever made and he'd gone and and you know I was a bit bereft I thought oh well it's a small small piece at work and this is the last picture I made of his sort of tenure there this is May 1999 and to give him his jus however much he failed however much he struggled the one thing he really did succeed in which I think is wonderful is that he did succeed in turning on the ecological sort of balance of of this pond when he took it over it was a pretty dead place when he left three years later there were herons there were kingfishers there were fish and so he had succeeded in some way even though this this this dream of his had come in a sense crashing down well I found subsequently also interest me going back to that myth that I was talking to you about this pastoral and-and-and and industrial this this pond is at the site of a manganese mine that was developed in 1795 by the local landowner and exploited for about 30 years during the course of which they dug a bloody great big deep pit pit pit and when the mine was abandoned about 1820 the hole that that and the land around it just became you know just nothing and so it's it's it's a site of you know industrial the Industrial Revolution where they you know the pastoral sort of has begun to come back in but anyway about a month later something fantastic happened I went back and suddenly I thought oh wait a minute there's another hand this was immediate somebody started cutting the grass and I knew immediately this was somebody else because this was much much more organized than this other guy had had done this was a much more rational and and and and sort of organized mind and I I went back a few times and I eventually found the guy who was doing he was another man from the village and he said I've taken on the task I've taken on the challenge and so I said to him do you mind if I keep photographing he said no not a problem I didn't establish quite such a good relationship with him and again so I started photographing and then something absolutely fascinating started happening because he began to impose another mythic narrative on this st. Pond and this is the one that I call improvement again if you go back through the development of the English landscape the idea of improvement that came out of enclosures this way of the aristocracy taking over control of of common land and and and making it more efficient improvement in terms of efficiency and so that meant hedging that meant creating kind of boundaries that meant building so the guy built a new metal shed he starts sort of hedging and in a little while we'll see a little bit more about what we mean by improvement look at these two pictures this is I think this is about February 2000 and this is a year later sorry so he's ripped out the little bearer of trees he's got a JCB and he smoothed the banks all of this used to have you know happened this is you know clearance and and smoothing the banks out the boat has now become a kind of an iconic kind of motif his little island is now a sort of functional piece of of of wood this sort of rational idea so for the next three years I photographs again and looked at the way that he was setting about transforming the world but you know from a from from an imaginative space up here partly something rather odd happened towards the end of this which is just I can tell you these stories that anecdotally I've never managed to publish this work I've been trying to publish it for 12 years because it is the most for me it's the most interesting thing that I've ever done because of this conjunction between you know they're all these different stories and that was that the land was owned by a by a family that had sat on on the land in this area of Devon for about six or seven hundred years and the the the current man who was that he was command called Earl Lord it is Lee who owned the land was loathe locally really unpleasant piece of work and he hated anybody coming on his land he did a lot of shooting that's when you just knew as soon as you went anywhere near his territory that you weren't wanted not only that you were quite aggressively thrown off and I'm not somebody who finds it easy to transgress borders I'm not like David who seems to enjoy going off so I was photographing on this guy's land without him knowing it I sort of snuck in and out fortunately he lived about a mile away but anyway when I came to want to sort of first show it I had to have an engagement with the bloke and I sort of wrote him a letter to say I've been photographing your pond for the last sort of six years and I'm making a piece of work and I'm gonna be showing it in the local museum which is why I had to get his permission because he was a trustee of the local museum and and so I'm writing to you to finish off that so here's another thing all of this stuff okay the man who lived next door to the guy who did the work through all his garden waste in the pond so here are just trees and everything it was just a yeah they're just a horrible sort of complicated kind of narrative so I wrote to this guy and said I mean I've been photographing this pond he sort of wrote back and said I want to talk to you about this we'd better have a phone conversation can you ring me up it was about 80 at the time so I rang him out never spoken to him knew a little bit about his reputation he was reasonably genial for the first couple of minutes and then he said so you've been photographing my pond from the road and I said no no I've been and he just completely flipped with absolutely bananas and ranted for about 10 minutes on the phone he said you're up and I'm not going to stop you showing these you're never going to show these is outrageous this is that our art in our did our and I thought to myself well I've spent six years doing this there's no way this guy is going to stop me showing this work but I had a little bit of a conflict this is the last picture of the the second episode so we're six years in now and sort of not looking too bad but but to talk a little bit about something else photographically that sort of mentioned today I have this narrative does hop around I hope you're following some of it I this amazingly enough I got a guy in New York who got deal I got very very excited by it he saw this work and he got very excited he said I'd like to represent you in America because I think this work really needs to be seen so I was more than happy and in and and we've had a working relationship ever since and after a while he said to me look I want to see this pond I saw okay if you want so it's nothing special I so now I want to come and see it so he got he left his apartment in New York and and get on a plane at JFK and flew to Heathrow and got on the train and came down to extra and I picked him up and drove him out to Upton pine two miles away and he got out the car and he walked round he came back about Temujin this it you know and I said well you've looked at 45 pictures of this pond pretty hard and he and I said you forget that Photography is a transformative experience you know process you're not you know the world in photography does not replicate what you what you see out there and this in no way actually replicates what the pond looks like but one of the other reason that I really really enjoyed making this work that was the pond the whole area of the poem is about the size of this space of this auditorium so for six years I basically went to a space this big and tried to make a new picture you know five ten times a year and that the discipline of just you know trying to succeed in that was was something I found very very rich and at the end I also made a very small sort of epilogue to the series and whenever I'm making a piece of work like this I'm I'm always thinking from the early as soon as I know I'm on a project I'm on a site I'm working I'm thinking about book and thinking about show and how this is going to work together and so this very much became a kind of a linear narrative with an introduction to these two stories and this is the epilogue because these are a series of pictures taken the pond is about five yards just to the left to the left here and these are a series of pictures which take step one away from the pond because once been very very enclosed you've been into nothing throughout this series but looking into the pond and last week we get a view down out of the valley and this is just a small sort of epilogue it's about four or five pitches I've any brought a few of them and I said two ponds this is the second pond I'm going to deal with this one very briefly but I want to talk about it because it introduces something another another another factor so this is a second pond this is called the painters pool because in about 2000 2001 I think I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine I teach in an art college whose guy was a painter as a man called and this guy was a painter and and he was if you think some of you are obsessive this guy was obsessive he painted in a little area of woodland called Stoke woods outside Exeter but for 26 years 365 days of the year whatever you get up on Christmas Day here presents kids get on his bike and go and go and paint completely obsessive character and all his paintings look the same bloody good painter and I said to him one day we were having a conversation in in the bomb room I love it where these things start off and I said to him so so where's it all coming almost it all about he said it's very very simple he said when I go into the middle of a piece of woodland if you could imagine yourself just entering into a piece of woodland and looking about and you've got a piece of paper and a pencil how on earth does an artist make a set of decisions to somehow rather deal with the insane complexity of what is present before them in in the canopy of a wood tens of millions of leaves and twigs and so on so how on earth do you begin to make a mark that deals with the complexity and that's what he'd been dealing with for 26 years just working away working away at that problem through through paint using the same palette even just working away and so on the day of his retirement another one of these lot of pathos in this story the day of his retirement he had a party in the woods was a bit of a loner this man and we went out to the woods and he had a lovely party during the course of which he developed a nosebleed but before he dare developed a nosebleed I'm jumping ahead of me itself in the story here he said to me have you ever seen my pond and I said no he said well I've built this pond in the middle of the wood you ought to go and see it and for my series of ponds I really wanted a woodland pond I loved the idea of finding a circular space with a sort of a you know no canopy above it just going up into interspace so I said oh Mike that sounds great anyway then he developed a nosebleed then three or four days later I said to my colleagues that work was not fantastic we have lovely doing listen to new here what happened and I said no what happened he said well guy had a huge tumor cut off his head the next day this nosebleed he'd worked for 35 years the day he retired he discovered he had a huge tumor in his head and so anyway I went to that went to the pond and I found look if you look at this pity here's his pond you can seem to see his easel and if this thing works there's his easel ok very strange guy because if he was painting he didn't believe in if and he wanted to make a picture there was a twig in the way he didn't snap it he got a piece of string and he sort of gradually pulled it out the way and then when he finished the painting he let it back so all these little bits of odd bits of string and stuff here so his presence is in the wood and for two years I went back to this pond and made a study and what I wanted to do originally was to see to might say to myself what happens when as a photographer I deal with the same question you know if you're dealing with how when you walk into a space this complicated you begin to make decisions about where am I going to point the camera what am I going to make pictures of and so that's what I was thinking about originally and so I was interested in the pond so I started making this pitch and I shot over two years just about 50 or 16 eggs and he got better again he started painting and then he got ill again he eventually died two years later and during the course of the pictures there's a couple of narratives going on there's there's this business about how do you photograph you know the decisions you make when you're making some pictures but gradually through the series of pictures signs of his presence gradually eroded he never took anything away and they just fall in and again it's another allegorical piece for me about sort of you know an artist striving we all you know work like hell and we make our stuff I was talking to Joe yesterday what's gonna happen to it all well the likelihood is that it'll all just sort of you know fall in and gradually through this series he disappears so this is this is called the painters pool this a there's a copy of a book outside published by knows Rayleigh and there's a short essay about him and his his painting in the back and also very simple celebration about again seasons and and sounds all of that's very much embedded in the pictures I think one thing I want to just say I should have said it earlier on and I kind of said it at the beginning then I don't want to give you the impression that all of this is just endlessly driven by making these big pieces of work I love I call making the architecture of a piece of work starting with with this very simple sort of place on an idea and then gradually photographing and creating a an edifice really out of a series of pictures and texts but actually just to remind you what really drives me is the problem of each day of how do I make a picture today that's what's really really exciting so let's not forget about that and notions of complexity and visual complexity have become ever more sort of challenging and interesting to sort of engage with mark-making thinking about the relationship between photography and painting and mark making and drawing these these kinds of relationships Green we've talked a lot about green today I've got my own personal theory about why Green doesn't work apart from the fact that this double pixel capture slightly exaggerated s' the you know and we you know this degrees my theory about green just to chuck it in David is that you've talked about how many forty four thousand different forty thousand okay the reason one of the reasons why greens are so difficult to deal with is that is because our eyes are so sensitive to the nuances of green so we look at this you know there are dozens and dozens and dozens of different greens in here and the photographic medium unfortunately is really crude when it comes to sort of expressing and working through the nuances so I think we're we're doubly trevally more sensitive to where the nuances of greens don't really work because it's the it's the color that that is is that our eyes are most sort of sensitive to so just kind of finally but this is sort of be a long finale perhaps okay so this is this is the the last piece of work or two pieces of work I'm going to going to talk about and this piece of work has some conceptual origin unlike almost everything that I've been talking to about today and Raphael was talking about the you know the conceptual sort of premises they're very important to me this one actually started with a conceptual premise and again it's another one of these wonderful wonderful accidents about 25 years ago I was in the office of a colleague and the woman came in the door and he said oh she said Elizabeth you must meet Jeb because you're both interested in rivers we had about a 15 minute conversation and she was a geographer who taught geography to tea into it within the context of teacher training if that makes sense in other words she taught geography teachers how to teach geography there was a job and she'd been carrying out a sort of a personal project for many years which she briefly told me about just for a few minutes and what she'd been doing was that she'd been going into school classrooms in primary schools for many years and she'd once a year go into a classroom and she'd hand every kid in the bin in the classroom a piece of paper a four piece of paper and a pencil and say draw a river and she just gathered them in and looked at them and then the next year go back and say the same thing and what she was interested in it was she was saying was that was it possible looking at the drawings to detect signs of when a child's understanding begins to develop a clever kind of perceptual conceptual sort of depth of understanding can you see in the drawings a moment or a period or time when knowledge and experience goes from sort of direct into a more conceptual kind of space and I thought wow that's just a beautiful beautiful thing to have done I've never seen any of her drawings I've never seen her again that was it just went off but it laid buried it was a seed that laid buried and about 2005 I was asked to give a paper to a group of cultural geographers and notting they go very very strong since where this guy Nick all three teachers very very strong cultural geography department there guy called Steven Daniels who writes brilliantly about landscape and the theme was on rivers so I said to myself what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go down my street with some pieces of paper hand them out to any kids I can laughs ooh give them a pencil and say draw a river I'm gonna show you the results now some of them so these are the results Oscar age 8 Oh look at that yeah that's the eldest kid now I just thought this is this is a tiny sample but I thought these are amazing so I showed them to this group of culture jokes and we're talking about now some of the really really top people in the country geographers and so on and they were sort of thing warm sweet thing so I said to them which one of you is actually going to stand up and define a river absolutely say what a river is how can you and they they also have to point because you know what a river is is completely beyond anybody's ability to to describe it it's just such an extraordinarily wide-ranging profound kind of thing but what was fascinating about another thing was fascinating about these these drawings were there all sorts of odd things that intrigued me so for instance we noticed that a lot of them start on the top right and flow down to the bottom left I have no idea what's going on there because there was I thought about left-handed right-handed they were they were mixed wasn't anything to do with that amazingly sophisticated look at that you know people understand turbulence patents they're all dealing with turbulence patterns on the surface these little round things interested me I started looking at these these things here and there's lots of them look round things round things and then I thought well look these are middle-class kids they live in Exeter if they see a river it'd probably be a Dartmoor River these are Dartmoor streams there drawing so when this is done so then I started developing this premise for making a piece of work and this is the basis of the premise but there's nowhere in our minds that what a river is is sort of neatly encapsulated we have got a little neurological space somewhere other which is sort of this is what a river is and when someone asks you what is a river you just sort of comes out the mind and memory doesn't work like that what happens is that memory basically is an active building kind of process in principle I'm not a sort of a psychologist but I've done a bit reading and I think this is what some people kind of now argue so when someone says to you what is a river depending upon who you are what your expertise is what your mode of communication is if you're a cartographer you'd start drawing lines if you're a you know a novelist you might start kind of writing or something or other but basically the act of answering the question draws out the understanding from the imagination from the mind so when a kid one of these children starts to draw they don't have this thing in their mind they basically make a mark and then they'll make another mark and then they'll draw something or other and then they'll put a healing it grows the answer basically is that it's it's it's sort of it's an active process of understanding so rather interesting this one in terms of this idea of how conceptually people begin to understand what a river is so this actually happens to be my youngest daughter she was about 10 or 11 at the time and she was the only one who drew any tributaries all the rest are just straight streams so I said - it's really interesting you've drawn these other other other streams you know and she said yes yes yes yes and I said but they're at an odd angle because you know they're coming up into the river and she said well the water flows down the river and then up these little streams so she'd got the idea of a tributary but she hadn't really understood the flow dynamics and so on more turbulence looked more rocks anyway I built a piece of work based on this so when I decided to do was to make a piece of work very very simply so I'm going to pick a river and I'm going to define what a river is I'm going to articulate what a river is by photographing one that's that's that's how I'm going to sort of make a piece of work and it was a wonderfully liberating thing for me personally to do because it meant that that was the room that was the sort of the limit of my conceptual sort of premise it was just let's see what happens when I set out to make a river through the act of photographing one so I picked the River X and over the last I started in about 2008 and over the last how long's that six seven years I've been going back to about 15 or 18 places not that many ah by any means to explore the whole whole river and started going back and just making pictures in the same places again and it's been a hugely enjoyable experience this is a place called Bickley this is the main river and so I've been I must have about maybe 3040 pictures of bitly now these are some of them these are within about 50 hundred meters of one another and so it's this practice again about going back to a very small place and trying to forge make and push out a you know an interesting picture by just continually the discipline and and and and the fascination with that so these are all Bickley and then I thought well of course rivers have sources but then have one source they've got hundreds of sources everywhere water where water welds up in the ground and within a within a River Basin is it's a source so I started making a small series of studies of River sources so this is one of those this is a place in place called mutants and sires very near Exeter and also rivers have tributaries but not only do they have tributaries they have hundreds thousands of small tiny streams why call unnamed streams that are all part of the sort of feeding in process so this is one of these unnamed streams so I started photographing lots of unlike all unnamed streams and to give you an idea of how you know it's just really interesting thing to do there was one of these little streams which was called Lady Brook and it flowed for about two miles then it it flowed it be joined another stream and it became the River Calvary and then it joined another stream about less than a mile further on it became the River yo and that flowed for about two miles into the river Creedy which four miles later Froude into the river X so if you took that as a single stream of water within ten miles you've got five or six different name pieces of River so I would put things together like that this is just one of these weird anecdotes this is one of my favorite little spots beautiful little little stream this and I went back here two years ago after you know years of photographing it and there's a footpath it's one thing I should say about this this work is that night while I'm at this little footpath running through through this wood and there was a sign on the footpath not very big one but basically said danger warning and when you look closer it said wild boars now roam and why you know freely in this area it's only two three miles from the centre of Exeter and the whole of this valley is just being trampled to bits and dug up by the boars they've completely and utterly smashed the you know the this rather glorious space to to smithereens although someone told me last week that they've just been they've killed them at last bit bizarre you know three miles from where you're living in the middle of Devon there and wild boars they were set out by one of these animal liberation groups that's breed a whole lot of balls in North Devon and now they're all over the county apparently this is the river Creedy so there was seven tributaries feeding into the DX so I started making a series of pictures of the tributaries this is the the Creedy and then something else of course is that rivers are dynamic we've talked we've heard you know Paul and other people talking about the sheer dynamism of energy this has taken a week after that for that picture there so this is exactly the same tree so by God do these this sort of dynamics is a heavily heavily flooding River so I'm wanting to deal also with the this-this-this you know a river isn't just a single sort of flow it has all sorts of different states and speights and so on anyway now we really are getting near the end in November 2011 I think I don't take many pictures during the summer so between March 2011 and November early November I didn't take any pictures and I picked the camera up again and I went back to the woods this is the painters pool again after the guy died whoops no what am i doing so this is the pool so I go back to these places I was here last week just making another couple of pictures I love going back but look a confluence of streams again this is the confluence of two unnamed streams I love this space where these two unnamed streams join together I went back and made this picture and I I had a fantastic spate of picture making so I might take anything you know that 1996 I shot twelve negs literally shot 12 pitches but now I'm my kids that near you know bitmap got a bit more time and I'd made by about I shot about fourteen eggs in three months which is extraordinary production for me really going it just photographing in a number of places along the river look we've just we've seen a picture of this tree before and another another picture of this tree and I was loving it was having a very very productive time really enjoying it still thinking about this river project and then something something happened which completely changed the whole the whole body of work this is the same little wooden at the balls now run through another picture of that this is elite just so I'm interested in all the dynamics of the of what not all of them that lots of the different dynamics of what at what a river system sort of consists of so this is now middle of no middle of December and then one night something that's never happened in all the years I've lived in Exeter before the snow really felt we had this incredible night of snow and my wife and I got up in about five or six o'clock realised it was snowing we went out for this long long walk and we went up around the hill and that came back down through the University campus now I never photograph in the University campus because one of the one of the one of might had all sort of you know decisions is that I'm I'm not the least bit interested in photographing places particularly that are sort of designed and manufactured I'm not interested in going to parks or anything what I like is is is sort of photographing places that become the way they are because of the processes that are driving them which is what's so interesting about a beach or a or a mining area because the processes that that are sort of unfolded during those things actually create the landscape that you find so this was a highly managed landscape with these small ponds but it was so exquisite so I took us I couldn't get out in the car so I started taking photographs of ore in the snow and then I had an idea and I said wow I'm gonna work on a completely new piece of work I'd never thought about doing this before I'm gonna photograph winter and I'm going to photograph winter just one winter by going from from from late autumn through to the first signs of spring and I want to make a piece of work about just one winter the transition of a single winter and I had in mind this poem by Edward Thomas wonderful poet and writer and walker so over the land freckled with snow half thawed and the speculating rooks that their nest cord and saw from elm tops delicate as flowers of grass what we below could not see winter pass so I had this idea of trying to make a piece of work about the transition of a single single winter and so I just kept photographing so this is week after that that first snow fell the same sort of viewpoint going back and just kept going and I photographed through to the first signs of spring and that book became the river winter and it's one of the most enjoyable sort of experience I've had a really enjoyed working on this series and in the book what I wanted to do this was very much thought I've never shown any of these pictures although I will hands I'll be seeing you hopefully in Stockholm they're going to be shown in arty Peleg in in in May in Stockholm a series of them if you're around in May so what I wanted to do with the book I love love making books like putting books together was to have just a sequence of photographs 40 pictures 30 pictures I don't know how many and but I wanted an essay and I asked this friend of mine and I know man called Richard Hamlin brilliant writer on science or science of history of geography science and geography to write an essay I gave him a very specific brief and he wrote this fantastic essay what the essay does it looks at fourteen thousand years of winters fourteen thousand years of winters because of what I wanted to do was to place this one winter against how winter as a phenomena has in a sense seeped into our imaginations during the time that we have been here in in you know since the last eight Ice Age completely different from Scandinavian winter completely different from a Mediterranean winter but the thesis is that those of us from Belgium France Britain winter is a very particular thing and it's very very powerfully lodged in our imagination and so he's written this wonderful essay that looks at literature and painting and writing and also the history of the winters and put that against this single winter so one looks at one winter in fourteen thousand this is one of the last pictures so here we have the very first buds of spring and there's one of the illustrations that we use from a bridal painting in the book I finished thank you very much okay yeah well not surprisingly I suppose we're running a little late there was no way I was gonna interrupt Jim because it was fantastic sorry about that no no no no it was fantastic exposition it was really interesting to see that the thought behind your work and and and I thought it was fabulous we're probably we're not going to do a question/answer session now because we are running a little bit late and so Jim will be around during the day tomorrow and and so you know for those of you who are joining us for the dinner so if you want to pose any questions for Jim please do feel free to do that but yeah just to say thank you again Jim because it was it was really really fun okay well thank you for the invite and thanks for being so patient yeah [Applause]

Channel: On Landscape

Views: 7,111

Keywords: +jem southam, +large format photography, +large format, +film photography

Id: vv9vezFysuI

Length: 83min 34sec (5014 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020