Jem Southam: Making the World Richer, Grander, and Better

Jem Southam

Jem Southam will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

History is embedded deep within all of Jem Southam's photography, but one of the pictures  that most resonated most with me is the one above, of a dew pond. Indeed, the very idea of what a dew pond is struck me as something rather beautiful.

These are man-made ponds in the middles of fields that fill with water (not the dew that gathers on the grass in the morning, but rainwater) for cows to drink.

Some of them are very old (Oxenmere  in Wiltshire dates back to Saxon times) so there is a sense of something ancient about them. They look old and they feel old.

That's why they featured as the wormhole through which Catweazle travelled from the 12th to the 20th century in the, er, phenomenally popular 1970s TV series of the same name.



Seeing Southam's pictures of dew ponds was for me like hearing a new word. It gave me a realisation of how the banal curves and contours of the land contain a profound history. And because of that suddenly I started becoming a bit more observant, and began looking for those curves and contours and what lies beneath them in the world around me.

And once I started looking for them, the signs of the past became more apparent. The obvious ones are easy to see, but then new ones start creeping in and the land becomes a far less benevolent or pretty place. It seethes with venality and menace.

In his work, Southam focusses on rockfalls, rivers, and ponds, places where the signs of geological, seasonal, and waterborne change are apparent. But this doesn't stand in isolation from human change and as you look at his pictures, this change starts to creep in too. The land begins to live and we become part of it.

It changes the way you see things too. John Davies does the same thing with his more urban pictures. I always love seeing this picture of Mersey Square in Stockport. It always touched me because the warehouse with the chimney coming out behind it used to house a skateboard park. It wasn't a very good one, but it brings back fond memories for me.

I showed this picture to a class one day and instantly one of the students dated it - 1986. He didn't get that from the captions, but from the number plates of the cars going up the A4.  That's how he sees this urban environment, through the cars that drive through it.

And then if I show it my dad, he sees a hat museum. Because Stockport has a long hat-making history and he was involved in that.




Now I live on the edge of Bath, with the Avon Valley stretching before me to the south, Solsbury Hill to the east and Bath to the west.

It's not the most dynamic of places but if I stand outside my house and look out, I can see a landscape that includes the following sites and histories.

Stone Age Settlements
Roman remains
The foundations of medieval farming terraces
The valley Jane Austen used to walk down
Georgian stone mines
Brunel's rubbish heap
The grave of the man who founded New South Wales
The grave of Jack the Ripper, depending on who you believe
An underground train and tunnel network
A second world war explosive dump
a Genesis song
A past road protest site
A murder site
The Australian Rugby Team
The world's second oldest bat
A future road protest site

The simple pastoral landscapes of the Avon Valley are anything but simply pastoral. They live and breathe human intervention, they are man-made, messed with by man, they contain corruption and violence, conquest and spite. These landscapes don't have the  isolation which we sometimes assume to be the case with pastoral landscape photography. They are connected to the past, the future, to faraway lands that we pillaged and conquered, to murder, romanticism, and short-sighted stupidity and greed,

But the problem is how to photograph this history. You don't embed that history into a landscape just by snapping a picture or two. It is more difficult than that. What Jem Southam does looks incredibly easy, but there is something in the process that adds depth and ties the image to the lay of the land, that puts you in the place in a manner where the folds of the land, the geology, the history, the sensation comes through.

I don't know how he does it. I believe Jem Southam's work is beyond something formal, and that there is a sense of mystery in there, that it is to do with his process of walking and being in and part of a place and the way in which that inhabits you in a non-photographic way. I like the idea that his photographic practice somehow mirrors the sensation of being in a place and of a place and connected to a place. And by being connected you connect others and you make the world grander and richer than it otherwise might be.

And that is why Jem Southam's work is important and why he's talking at Beyond the Visual: Music, Word, and Landscape.

Exactly what he'll be talking about is still a mystery however because Southam's talks are always different and always made in response to the when and the where of the occasion which makes things even more exciting. So there's another draw for you .

Susan Derges will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

Class, prejudice and the British School System

 I love the way different people see different things in different pictures, how their cultural and visual literacy affects what they see and how they see it. The most visually literate may be culturally illiterate, may make critical assumptions that are based on less than solid assumptions.

I've shown the above pictures to diverse groups of students. The top picture is from Raimond Wouda's excellent school series. One Dutch-Somali student  (not a photography student) instantly identified the pictures as Dutch and then clicked off where different students came from, what their politics were, their interests, the degree of religious affiliation and where female Muslim students came from based on how they wore their hijab - something that would be beyond virtually every serious photography critic or commentator including myself.

I showed the John Davies picture of Mersey Square, Stockport (bottom picture) to a group of doc-phot students at Newport and one (hi Reggie!) started looking at the number plates and clicked off the year the cars were made and gave an educated guess to when the picture was made - 1986. I always look at the picture and look at the warehouse on the right - it was an indoor skatepark where I used to skateboard in the late 1970s.

Show the Rosa Parks picture to people who are not familiar with it and, as well as making the 'correct' interpretation (is there such a thing?) they guess that the two people in the picture are getting married, that he's putting a ring on Parks's finger or that she's hurt herself and he's putting a bandage on her finger (he has a kind face).

Anyway, all that talk of school gets me thinking of school selection in the UK. It's an incredibly divisive subject. My wife and I have just put down our choices for the school Isabel will go to next year. It wasn't too difficult 1) Because nearly all the schools in Bath are very good and we don't have the dilemmas that seriously urban parents have and 2) Because there is a great school called St Marks right on our doorstep with committed teachers, a dynamic head and an inclusive approach that means pupils get to engage and learn with a mix of students.

Not everybody feels the same way. Most of Isabel's female classmates are going to an all-girls school on the other side of town called Hayesfield. Many reasons are given for this (at St Marks the classes are too small, the drama department isn't as good as at Hayesfield, the art department's better at Ralph Allen, it's a faith school, it's too close too home, it's not a cool school, it's good to go to a big school, the pet snake is bigger at Ralph Allen, they had robot cars at the open evening at Beechen Cliff etc etc...)  but the underbelly of most of the reasons is that upper-middle class parents don't send their children to St Marks. So in the last few weeks I've had one parent tell me that only poor people send their children to St Marks so his daughter is going to Hayesfield  - another said they wanted to send their son to Beechen Cliff so he could meet wealthy kids and get free holidays. Yet another said they were going to send their son to Beechen Cliff because that's where rich people whose children didn't get into Kingswood or Royal High (very expensive Bath private schools) sent their boys too. And then just yesterday a parent asked how the new head at St Marks could overcome this problem of no-upper-middle-class-parents and attract parents from that wealthier socio-economic background.

And then I wondered? Why would any school want to attract parents from an upper-middle-class background? Why would a school  want to entice parents who are openly prejudiced against children who are economically less well-off?  Where does this impulse to pander and suck up to divisive and discrimatory wealthy come from? 

What do people think? That the 'rich' are going to make friends with you and spread their money around. That there is going to be some kind of informal trickle-down effect. I know some exceptionally generous wealthy people, but really, is that the way to govern your life - to let your ideals, values and opinions be swung by the sniff of mammon. And if that's what the parents think, well what about the kids? What kind of people are they? And would I want my daughter to be hanging around with the spawn of these lickspittle money-grubbing sychophants?

Bringing it back to photography, as well as wondering how much lickspittle sycophancy there is in photography, how can one portray the ideas in images? How can words and pictures convey the deep-rooted hypocrisy of free parental choice, the manner in which contempt and snobbery are passed on through family, education and association?

I think Raimond Wouda comes close in some ways, but in a Dutch context, which is very different. And he's not explicit in that respect. I'd love to see some British photographers really addressing class in their work and the way the kind of choices I've mentioned don't just affect a society but help make it destructive and negative. Perhaps I should give it a go.

University of Wales, Newport video of a Raimond Wouda talk.

Urbanautica interview with Raimond Wouda

The thing that fascinates me about the secondary school is the fact that is a closed world. I call it a micro-cosmos. The students are going there 5 to 6 days a week, they see the same people everyday, and the physical barrier is the fact that there is a fence that surrounds the schoolyard. In the development of a juvenile the secondary school plays a very important role because it’s the place were you will become aware of your identity. So in a way secondary school plays a major role on how people are formed, on how they develop as a person. In the environment of the secondary school the relationship with the other also plays an important role in the shaping of your identity. It’s always about who am I and how am I dealing with the others. In which group or subculture I belong? Who are my friends? How do they look like? What kind of music do they listen to? What books do they read? All this question that you are going to ask yourself for the first time are related to the context of the secondary school.

The New Ruins of Great Britain, John Davies, Jem Southam and Bristol's collapsing luxury flats

Owen Hatherley's book, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, is a strangely entertaining read. So often I don't know the places he is talking about, or the buildings he is referring to, but he somehow makes his visions clear - partly because it's a vision that is apparent to all who live in Britain today - the destruction of the urban landscape through the deliberately mediocre (see also this piece by Jay Merrick). It's a British version of The Geography of Nowhere, a laying of a baseline of comparison not in the 90s or the 80s but in those isolated pockets of time where planning took account of public space and public needs - indeed where the very idea of "public" had some kind of meaning that had not been eroded by the ideas of the market or the commercially competetive.

Amongst others, Hatherley looks at Southampton, Manchester (the worst offender in Hatherley's view), Milton Keynes, London, Newcastle, Glasgow, Sheffield and Liverpool. Sadly he does not look at Bristol where the balconies have almost been falling off residents' leaky harbourside prize-winning luxury flats. 
 I rode past the flats today on the harbour ferry - a ride through the bad and ugly of contemporary urban development in Britain.  However, Hatherley does  look a little  at the corruption that has been accompanying this redevelopment/destruction - corruption of both the institutionalised kind and the good old-fashioned backhander kind, but one gets the feeling that he is just scratching the surface with this and that more revelations will start appearing across the country, in every city, in the not-too-distant future - a kind of saved-up scandal-in-waiting because the only thing that can possibly justify some of the abysmal development in Blair's Britain is wodgeful of £50 notes stuffed into very hefty envelopes. Oh, and a level of incompetence that borders on the criminally insane. Or both. 
 
Hatherley also looks at Britain's great landscape photographers, John Davies, and describes
his British Landscapes as a book containing "...astounding photographs of usually derided, master-panned postwar landscapes - the chaos of intersections in Herbert Manzoni's Birmingham, the meticulously planned hillscape of J.L.Womersley's Sheffiedl - taken from the planner's vantage point. That is, from above, seemingly either from the top of a tower blolck (where the perspective is supposedly bleak and isolating) or an office block (where it is the perspective of the lord of all he surveys). These images combine a certain stillness with a barely suppressed charge of excitement."

And I suppose that is the mark of any great photography - it escapes the photography ghetto and becomes relevant to the wider world. In British landscape photography, John Davies and Jem Southam do this with a degree of finesse, Davies through his reading of the urban landscapes and the layers of architecture, planning and usage of the sites he photographs. Southam meanwhile does a similar thing with the semi-rural landscape, looking at how human and animal interaction creates architectural layers to the landscape.

Gerry Badger writes about Southam in Some Stories in Search of an Ending: 'Southam's is a deeply rooted art. "I need to attach myself to a place and return again and again to make work there," he says. It is necessary for him to have "knowledge" of a site before he can begin to impart that knowledge to his audience.

His repeated workings of a site result in a specialist knowledge of that ground, a feeling of kinship with it, a sensing of its spirit its past. It may be an overused phrase, but Jem Southam's work is essentially about the genus loci, the history of a place and its ghosts - those who once occupied the same territiories he now metaphorically occupies through his photographs.'

Which brings us right back to Owen Hatherley. Reading his book, one is infused with some kind of spirit of a place, of what it was and is as well as what it might have been or still could be. I think he writes of the genus loci of the places he visits, as Southam photographs them - and so even though I do not have the faintest clue of where or what he is talking about, I am still drawn into his writing, I am hypnotised into reading it.

John Davies

John Davies is the next nominee for the Deutsch Borse, nominated for The British Landscape exhibition. I love his work because it is so simple, direct and uncomplicated. His pictures are very familiar to me (Stockport Viaduct above is a couple of miles from my home ) and instantly recognizable. I also like him because he is a straightforward documentary photographer, something of a rare breed in the UK, and the layers of meaning in his images, the conflict between the rural and the urban reflect the layers of Davies' own life and British society as a whole.