I’ve recently been made aware of the work of Edwin Smith (1912 – 1971), the English architectural and landscape photographer (I’m slightly embarrassed to say I’d not come across his work before embarking on We English).
Here’s a short bio from the V&A’s website (they hold a collection of his prints) – Smith’s photographs illustrated many books dealing with ‘English Cottages and Farmhouses‘ (1954), ‘English Parish Churches‘ (1952) and ‘Hatfield House‘ (1973). From the Second World War onwards, Smith began to look at rural Britain and architectural subjects. In the 1950′s, he illustrated a number of books on the landscape and architecture of Britain, including English Parish Churches, English Cottages and Farmhouses and The English Gardens. By the time of his death in 1971 Smith had illustrated more than 30 such volumes. Apart from these numerous book commissions, he often photographed simply to note and capture nuances of civic life. His photographs are testimony to the sympathetic approach he adopted towards British life and landscape.
You can see a selection of Smith’s prints at Chris Beetles gallery in London and on their website here.
And there’s more about Smith’s work at these links-
Prints from We English on show at Somerset House as part of the Landmark: Fields of Photography exhibition. More information about the show here and additional installation shots on Flowers Gallery website here.
Image: Studying a We English print exhibited at Landmark, Somerset House, March 2013
The online magazine Distorted Arts has reviewed my We English work, which currently features in the Landmark Exhibition at Somserset House.
“Roberts’s photographs reside somewhere between documentary and pure landscape. Many of his images contain poignant vignettes set against dynamic panoramas. Camel Estuary is populated with staffage straining against one another. Their interaction enlivens the scene, while the tamed sea, blue sky and sweeping shore evoke the English tradition of land, leisure and pleasure.
A contemporary archive of Englishness; Roberts’s work captures people, places and events beautifully. Figures in the landscape are small, but significant – the Arcadian shepherds and smiling rural folk of a Victorian landscape are replaced by windswept trekkers, crowded stadiums and post-modern reverie.”
Positive View Foundation has unveiled details of its next major exhibition to be held at London’s Somerset House in London this March – a sweeping overview of the rich genre of 21st Century Landscape photography. The novel exhibition is the first of its kind anywhere to show both the harsh, even brutal realities of the changing environment, as well as its enduring and stunning beauty.
The exhibition will include several of my prints from We English. There is more information available here.
Landmark: the Fields of Photography is a wide-ranging and ground-breaking exhibition featuring more than 70 of the world’s most highly regarded photographers from North and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia, with many of them showcasing previously unseen and recently completed works. It will run from 14th March – 28th April 2013 and is curated by the globally respected curator, William A. Ewing.
Focusing on our rapidly changing planet, ‘Landmark: the Fields of Photography’ features more than 170 original works of art taken by enterprising photographers employing technology ranging from 19th Century plate-camera techniques to the use of planes, drones, robots and even satellites to capture vivid images of earth’s varied terrain – and even distant planets. Many of the major names in photography are represented: Mitch Epstein, Nadav Kandar, Ryan McGinley, Robert Adams, Simon Norfolk, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lee Friedlander, Simon Roberts, Toshio Shibata, Robert Polidori and many others contributing spectacular imagery. Also featured are striking images by a younger generation of photographers: Pieter Hugo, Susan Evans, Raphael Dallaporta, Penelope Umbrico, Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, and others.
Observadores: Photographers of the British Scene from the 1930’s to now – in on show at Galeria de Arte do Sesi in Sao Paulo about British photography, organised by the British Council and curated by Joao Kulcsar in San Paulo and Martin Caiger-Smith in London.
This year’s festival, called Terra Cognita, transcends photographic genres to sketch a picture of the relation between man and nature, on the basis of the work of 115 photographers. Terra Cognita is about the experience of nature, in all its manifestations, from tactile, living and breathing nature, to the nature of our thoughts, its dreamed and fantastic incarnations. Although man sometimes seems to be hardly present in the photos, he has unmistakably left his stamp on it. In all this work the landscape reveals the emotions and thoughts that the photographer has projected on it. The diverse and complex ways in which we see and experience landscapes – the nature in our genes and our minds – echo through the breadth of Terra Cognita. From timeless black and white to conceptual or computer generated, the blending of genres is total. Like nature itself, this is an exhibition not just to be seen, but to be experienced.
An interview I did with Lars Boering during De Donkere Kamer #12 at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, where I discuss my practice, projects and books. September 17, 2012.
