Landscape Stories.

Landscape Stories. Photographs by Jem Southam. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2005. 150 pp., 90 colour photos, 12½x11½".

Jem Southam is a well-known British photographer. He is known for "his series of colour landscape photographs, beginning in the 1970s and continuing until the present. His trademark is the patient observation of changes at a single location over many months or years".


In 'Landscape Stories' Southam "photographs southwest England, a landscape that has been worked and re-worked by human hands for centuries, choosing to enter into the landscape tradition fully aware of the variety of modes of representation that beset its past.

He avoids what Grundberg calls ‘celebratory’ pictures of the land, preferring instead to present images of rivers and rocks and shrubbery, and also man’s domestic responses to his surroundings, the stone walls, domesticated animals, and cut flowers of countryfolk.

Work from several series is presented, including Red River, Rockfalls, Rivermouths, Ponds, Upton Pyne and various Other Stories."


First quote V&A ; second quote from Darius Himes/publisher's description.