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

The Retirement of Steve Gerrard: It's like the death of film

While in Liverpool I went to see Steve Gerrard's last game at Anfield. The tears flowed, the emotion was high and Liverpool got hammered by Crystal Palace. But still, it was like the ending of an era, right up there with the death of Gracie Fields or the last appearance of Ena Sharples on Coronation Street. That's the 1970s vibe that Steve Gerrard has.

Anfield didn't have that 1970s feel to it.  It was only Gerrard, running around like a dynamo wormhole that took you back into a place where Jimmy Saville and Gary Glitter were top of the pops, Starsky and Hutch were the height of fashion sophistication and food was something that was fried with salt on it. Times were that good!

It was an era when football was dirty and ignored by politicians. It wasn't even hated yet, it was simply irrelevant.

Going to football in those days was like a 50p psychoanalysis session where the catharsis would come through the despair, the rage, the celebration and the constant stream of abuse. You'd stand there crushed up next to a cast of unwashed characters who would live out the frustrations of the daily lives on the terraces in a myriad of different ways and watch the offside trap, the back pass and the head butt be played out in all their variations by kids from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and nowhere much else. It was piss-streaming-down-the-back-of-the-stands grim and there was no pleasure involved. The football was terrible too. As terrible as it is now with the added value of players who were eating pies (we didn't have kebabs in the 1970s) and been on the piss the night before.

Pleasure didn't come into it, nor did hospitality or comfort. It was all asbestos, crumbling concrete and watered down bovril. Now it's clean and corporate and it costs £50 to go to a match with security officials eyeballing and pointing at anyone who so much as hints at a bad word. It's more or less safe and more or less enjoyable and far less offensive. You get to sit down and you actually see the football.

I look nostalgically on the old days of decaying stadiums, standing in the pissing rain with the threat of violence ever present, but wonder if actually what looks and sounds like absolute shite was absolute shite.

I was trying to explain this to my family when I got home they asked me exactly in what way it was better. It they had been photographers, I would have said it's the difference between analogue and digital; the 1970s was analogue and now is digital. And for the purposes of this blog post and nothing else, analogue is better. Long live film! It's not the same with digital. Film has soul! Film is real, pixels aren't. Viva film! Fuck digital. Money grubbing digital bastards!

That kind of thing.



But they're not photographers so the best I could do was say that football in the 1970s was like Catweazle compared to a 21st century boxed set. Catweazle is a 1970s TV show which involves a wizard who travels from the 11th century to an England where there are televisions, tractors and telephones - which he mistakes for magic. It's rough and ready but it has a heart and soul and a sense of place and a time. It's Stevie Gerrard.

As opposed to something contemporary like Breaking Bad, a programme that is very well-made, but so unfeasibly plotted (why didn't someone just kill Walt and put us out of our misery in Series 1) with so many unlikeable characters that it should be remembered only for the hat worn by Walter White, a hat that only Bono beats in the hat stupidity awards.

In footballing terms, Breaking Bad is Ronaldo, on the surface full of power, skills and vision, but as a human ultimately shallow and without a soul.



But Catweazle. Ah... A wizard who arrives in the future in a dew pond (something Jem Southam photographed). What could be more perfect than that? So even if the 1970s were rubbish, chaotic and makeshift they touched something that the scheduled to the minute, inoffensive, corporate-skinned present never gets near.

Catweazle arrives in the future in a dew pond


Picture: Jem Southam

Join the Catweazle Fan Club here. There's a Catweazle Fan Club! Wow! No, I didn't put the link up but if you really want to you'll find it yourself.