I reviewed Jem s'outham's A River Winter for Photo-Eye last month, but it arrived too late for me to put it in my Best of Lists.
In the review I write about how Jem Southam is the kind of man who would give vegetables from his allotment to his neighbours. I wrote that because I have a friend who used to be a neighbour of Jem Southam - and guess what, Jem Southam used to give him vegetables from his allotment. That type of thing always impresses me, the simple acts of kindness (in Southam's case), or honesty (in Winterson's case), or generosity (in Adam Fuss' case).
I know it shouldn't affect how one sees work, but it does all the time. But if it's kindness, honesty and generosity that affect my perception of work, what is it for other people? What does the business in the Gallery or the Fashion or the Advertising world.
Mmm, I'm reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson at the moment, and think the answer might be in there somewhere. But enough of that for now, and let's get back to Jem Southam. Here's the review I wrote for The River Winter.
See more images here (but Southam's work is definitely best seen somewhere other than on a screen)
Jem Southam’s pictures are quiet and unspectacular. They
feature rural landscapes where changes happen over a period of days or months or years. Fields, ponds, rivers and
rockfalls are Southam’s territory, rural sites where there’s nothing much to be
seen, places where most photographers would move on from in search of a better
(more spectacular) picture.
So you look at his pictures and wonder what the fuss is all
about. And then you look at another and another, and the fuss creeps up on you.
Southam is an organic photographer, he’s one with the land. He’s a kind
photographer, the sort of man who keeps an allotment and gives his produce to
his neighbours. For some reason, he seems kind and as a result his pictures are
kind. Southam is a walking photographer and as you look at his pictures, you
start to fall into his stride. As the places he walks in become familiar, the
changes he photographs form a texture and become almost tangible. With his
rockfalls, you can feel the rocks, you can imagine clambering over the beaches
where he lugged his 10 by 8 camera and tripod. With The Pond you smell the
autumn foliage, visualise the mayflies dancing over the still body of water he
photographed over the years.
The River Winter follows the same pattern. It creeps up on
you and makes itself familiar. Southam’s work seeks out a quiet empathy,
drawing you out into a nature that is unromantic but lyrical. For The River
Winter, Southam photographed the waters around the River Exe from the end of
autumn in 2010 to the first signs of spring in the following year.
For the weather-obsessed Briton the timespan is instantly
identifiable. Winters in southwest England
used to be mild affairs, punctuated only by what the English weatherperson
calls ‘wintry showers’, ‘patches of frost’ and ‘frozen fog’. Snow was virtually
unheard of and the idea that it would ‘settle’ was a distant dream. Then in
2008, it did settle. That means the snow stuck to the ground and got deeper and
deeper. For the first time in 20 years near enough, England was covered in
snow. The country came to a standstill and for the first time in their lives,
children could toboggan and have snowball fights in God’s Own Country.
Hallelujah!
I remember that winter because the day it snowed I went
sledging down Solsbury Hill (the one in the song) with my daughter and her
friends. I remember the winter of 2010 because of the frigid temperatures and
the ice on the roads in the 2 weeks before Christmas. I remember the snowfall
and a week of snowball fights and sledging that lasted for 7 days until Boxing
Day when the Big Melt began.
So I recognise that weather in Jem Southam’s photographs. It
starts with ‘The Confluence of Two
Streams’, taken on Halloween in Stoke Woods. The stream is a muddy trickle, its
banks covered with the bronze and yellow leaves of fall. A fern dead centre in
the foreground adds a primaeval touch, the idea of an old landscape, one where
the rhymthms of the seasons have precedence over the vanities of humanity.
The landscape is lyrical but not one you would necessarily
want to walk in. It’s organic and sodden, blocked by webs of leaves and
branches. The bodies of water that appear in every photograph are alive,
necessary but not attractive. There is little artifice in what Southam does,
but rather a simplicity and a clarity of expression that is a wonder to behold.
Fall passes to winter and the first frosts appear. Weeds and
reeds and teasels take on a delicate silver quality of winter and then the
layer of crystals disappears. There is a thaw and the greys turn back to the
dark browns and olive greens of the dank early winter. Snow comes with a
vengeance on 20th December. Taddiforde Brook is shown on the first
day of the snowfall, with the overhanging branches of trees laden with pristine
snow. It’s not quite Narnia, it’s too messy for that, but it’s halfway there,
with the frozen brook water adding a definite chill to proceeding.
Six days
later and we see the brook again. The thaw is coming and the snow has thinned
out. In one of the few signs of human intervention, there are snowballs on the
ice and a few cracks where somebody has perhaps tried to break the ice; all
part of the fun of an English winter.
And so the snow melts. White snow turns into brown mud, and
the undergrowth has died back. Everything is dead now. Cold and wet and dead.
Before sunlight and spring reappear, we see the River Winter moribund and
desolate. In three pictures of ‘The River Creedy at Sweetham’, all the green
has gone. The cold and the snow has denuded the river bank of all life; a
quiet, English catastrophe has hit the vegetation.
And that is what Southam’s work is all about; quiet
catastrophes on a local scale, with pictures that are atavistic in their
execution, that take us back to a time when we walked in tune with fluctuations
of the natural, unbuilt environment of which we are just a small part. His work
reminds us of our place in the big scheme of things, of our mortality, our
vulnerability and the fact that we are just bit players. The wonder is that he
doesn’t need to photograph grand panoramas to do this. Instead a muddy trickle
of a river and some moderately cold weather are enough for him.
