Sound, Word and Landscape: How we think about, make and show pictures

Robert Adams famously described how the best landscape photography is a combination of the geographical, the autobiographical and the metaphorical.

Which covers the speakers at Word, Sound and Landscape on November 7th in Bristol.

But more than that, their covers how word, sound, music and a collaborative approach result in work that goes beneath the pretty and pastoral - and takes us to the heart of the places we walk, live and inhabit in different ways.

It's the idea that landscape photography needs to go beyond the visual to have any kind of depth. The same could be said of all kinds of photography, but it seems that landscape is leading the way in thinking how sight, touch, materiality, sound, smell, body and mind can all come together in the making and the showing of work.

Word, Sound and Landscape is about more than just the making of pictures. It's the whole process. On the day there are speakers who have at the heart of their work

• the raison d'etre of why we make pictures
• the linking between place and the making of images
• the materiality of the image and how that connects to place and our self 
• the physical linkage between  arriving at a place, being in a place and making in a place
• how traces of history appear and change our understanding of the places we inhabit
• how emotion connects to environment, and how sound and music link the two
• how the exhibiting of work can take us into the places where we photograph

It's a day that touches on how we think about, make and exhibit photography. If you are remotely interested in land, in place, in photography or the world in which we live, you should be there.

Speakers include Beth and Thom Atkinson, Esther Vonplon, Max Houghton, Jem Southam, fPaul Gaffney, Angus Carlyle.

Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual is at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:30 - 19:30 (a buffet dinner will follow at 20:00)

Buy Tickets here

'Come Friendly Bombs...': Missing Buildings by Thom and Beth Atkinson

‘When it is all over, a few of the wrecked buildings might well be left as permanent ruins… To posterity they will as effectually represent the dissolution of our pre-war civilisation as Fountains Abbey does the dissolution of the monasteries.’

From the preface to The Architecture of Destruction, by John Piper, Architectural Review 1941

Beth and Thom Atkinson will be talking at  Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here


Beth and Thom Atkinson  launched their great book, Missing Buildings at the Photographers' Gallery last week. 

And they'll be launching it again in Bristol for Sound, Word and Landscape. 

The book is about London and looks at the empty spaces where buildings that were bombed during the war fell - and were never replaced. That's why it's called Missing Buildings. 



It's a really simple project that captures the imagination in an instant, where a quite distant past is architecturally, spatially and visually connected to the present in the most direct way possible. 

It changes the way you look at the city around you, giving empty spaces a poignancy and a history that they didn't have before. And not just from bombings, but from all kinds of construction, development and destruction that take place in an urban environment.

This is part of what Thom says about the project.

'For us, the most interesting part of the project is found in the mysterious and ambiguous sites. Most of our sites can be traced back to the Blitz easily, using the bomb census maps. In many cases we can even discover the kind of bombs which caused the damage. But some of the sites are sort of lost in the mists of time - they look like bomb sites and there’s a good reason to believe they are, but the records aren’t always there to know for sure. The bombing has left its mark on the physical landscape, but it’s also left a mark on our imaginations - in the mythology of London - and a missing building in London just means something different to one in say, Paris or Edinburgh. For us that’s where the depth of the project lies - in the myth.


there’s a sort of subconscious memory of it everywhere. We get a lot of people coming up to us when we’re shooting - they start remembering the locations of bomb sites and can talk for ages about it - it’s one of my favourite things about shooting it. I think the gaps and the signs of damage are subliminal but they’re also everywhere - I think people are subconsciously aware of them. That’s the premise we started from because it’s how we felt about London ourselves.'

Beth and Thom Atkinson will be talking about all this and much, much more at  Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here


Buy Missing Buildings Here