Invite for the exhibition at Klompching gallery, New York. If you happen to be in town, pop by and say hello….

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Just wanted to give you a head’s up that a selection of photographs from We English will be published in this Saturday’s Weekend Magazine in the Guardian. Check it out if you have the opportunity.

And if you didn’t see it, there’s a piece on their website here and a slideshow of images here.

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After two years of (mostly) hard graft, the end is finally in sight. I received the first bound copy of We English from the printers last week and the rest are in a container somewhere in Europe on their way to bookshops. It’s a strange feeling, one of relief (that’s it’s nearly all over), of jubilation (great to have a second book out there), of pleasure (I like it), of gratitude (too many people to mention – although a special shout to Mrs. R), of anxiety (will anyone like it?) and of anticipation (maybe they will!).

So here it is, the final edit of 56 photographs (you can see them all on the gallery page of this website):

© Simon Roberts, 2007-2008

You’ll notice that I’ve now updated the website with a couple of new pages detailing various exhibitions and book signings, as well as the special edition box set (more on that later). Do take a look.

Anyway, my job is nearly done (on this project at least). I hope you enjoy the work and I look forward to hearing your comments in the months to come. I will be continuing with the blog for a few more months so do stick around.

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I just received an invitation from photographer Peter Dench this afternoon with details of an intriguing new project he’s workig on called ‘Carry on England’ (a play on the Carry On films – a long-running series of low-budget British comedy films).

The series will be shown as an evening projection at the Visa Pour L’image festival in Perpignan. Produced in association with Stern Magazine the work features, in his words:

“The bald, the old, the military obsessed, the posh, the poor, overweight & infirm. And introducing – asbo kids”

And if the photographs he enclosed with the invitation are anything to go by, they are taken with his inimitable style and dry humour-

© Peter Dench/ from Carry On England

© Peter Dench/ from Carry On England

The screening will taken place on Tuesday 1st September 2009 at 9.45pm in Campo Santo.

His work is well worth a look, particularly his drinkUK project, which you can see on his website. Here are a couple of photographs to wet (pardon the pun) your appetite-

 

© Peter Dench/ from drinkUK

© Peter Dench/ from drinkUK

If any of you see the screening, do report back on the work. I’d be interested to find out more.

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As Peter Walker writes in a recent article in The Guardian, the word staycation – a predicted mass shift by recession-hit Britons towards domestic holidays – has slipped inexorably into the modern tourist lexicon in just a matter of months. And if you believe all the media reports on this phenomenon, a combination of the recession and the feeble pound will see/have seen millions of families abandoning their villa on the Algarve for a cost-conscious domestic alternative.

According to a recent survey by Mintel, some 35% of Britons said the economic climate had stopped them from booking a main holiday in the next six months, despite the fact that such a break has increasingly become seen as a right rather than a privilege throughout the recent era of cheap, easily accessible overseas travel. As a result domestic holiday centers such as Butlins – that veritable English institution – are enjoying a revival.

Butlins, the nation’s favourite cheap and cheerful holiday resort may have battled with an image problem in the past but new investment is hoping to put it firmly on the pampering map! The company’s PR department has obviously been in overdrive recently with articles on their new £20 million Ocean Hotel in Bognor Regis (the South Coast resort that famously caused George V to exclaim ‘Bugger Bognor!’ when told by his doctors to convalesce there) featuring in most of the national newspapers. Take this report in the Daily Mail for instance.

© John Hinde Ltd/ Chris Boot Ltd

The first holiday camps in the UK were the masterplan of entrepreneur William ‘Billy’ Butlin, who had seen some lakeside holiday centres during a visit to Canada during World War I and realised that they were something that could easily be introduced to his native Britain. Butlin selected the seaside town of Skegness, Lincolnshire, for the location of his first holiday camp, which was opened on 11 April, 1936. The story goes that he first spotted what became the company slogan – “Our true intent is all for your delight” – emblazoned on a fairground organ, little knowing that it was a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

© John Hinde Ltd/ Chris Boot Ltd

Stephen McClarence charts the background to Butlins in an article in the Telegraph here. McClarence writes “Butlin, a canny South African-born fairground man who started out with a single hoopla stall, realised that the unreliable British climate left holidaymakers with a problem – what to do when it rained. Reputedly fed up with trudging around a monsoon-lashed seaside resort in search of shelter and amusement, he came up with the idea of a holiday village with all-inclusive accommodation, meals and entertainment. And plenty of roofs. The appeal was simple. From dawn (signalled by a cheery “Good morning, campers!” over the tannoy), to dusk, there was no need to organise anything for yourself. It was all there on site and on tap: ballrooms, theatres, golf courses, swimming pools – brimming, if Forties posters can be believed, with sleek, chic young people with dazzling smiles. Vast dining rooms served meals on an industrial scale. It was all ‘Biggest… Brightest… Best’ and its heyday was the Sixties, with two million overnight guests a year.”

© John Hinde Ltd/ Chris Boot Ltd

© John Hinde Ltd/ Chris Boot Ltd

In the 1960s, Billy Butlin commissioned colour photography maestro John Hinde to immortalise his empire. The results spawned the tradition of the lurid, hyper-real postcard. Each photograph was stringently composed by Hinde and his team, and the colour saturation doctored to render everything in unnatural Technicolor. It was the job of two German photographers (Elmar Ludwig and Edmund Nagele) and one British (David Noble) to execute the photographs to Hinde’s rigorous formula. At the time, the results were deliberately populist adverts, but as Holly Kyte writes in The First Post, “now these delightfully artificial social documents have, unintentionally, become art instead.”

The postcards were brought together in a wonderful book edited by Martin Parr and published by Chris Boot. Our True Intent is all for Your Delight was published in 2005.

“Long viewed only as a master of kitsch Hinde is now recognised, albeit posthumously, as a peerless social documentarian. Dazzling in their their colour intensity and strange clarity…. Visionary, Wonderful.” Sean O’Hagan, The Observer, London

“Extraordinary…the combination of aesthetics and promotion produced something that bypasses documentary and approaches an arresting British surrealism.” David Jays, Financial Times

© John Hinde Ltd/ Chris Boot Ltd

© John Hinde Ltd/ Chris Boot Ltd

It’s interesting to note that the postcards had an impact on the young Martin Parr, who worked over two summers at Butlin’s in the early 1970s and introduces the images for this book. You can see how the photographs has had a lasting impact on his own photographic aesthetic – Martin Parr’s portfolio on Magnum website.

More than 10 million British holidaymakers have stayed at Butlins since then, and though modernised versions of the camps still exist, their glory days have long been over (que the new Ocean Hotel resort).

There is an article on the John Hinde postcards written by Michael Collins in The Telegraph here.

You can read a potted history of the Butlins resorts on the BBC website here.

And here is a slideshow of photos from Butlins resorts in their heydey.

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The Glorious Twelfth is usually used to refer to August 12, the start of the shooting season for Red Grouse and this time last year I was traipsing around the North Yorkshire Moors in the pouring rain photographing one such shoot (see my blog posts here and here).

Grouse Shoot, Hutton-le-Hole, August 18th 2008 © Simon Roberts

After several very poor seasons due to outbreaks of disease-carrying parasites and unsuitable weather, grouse moors are reporting a surge in bird numbers this season. Moor owners believe it may be the best for a decade. And according to a recent article in the FT, this expensive past time has got even more so. Shoot owners say prices for the most select grouse shooting in northern England and Scotland have risen to £160 a brace, or pair of birds, compared with £140 last year, so the typical party of nine shooters could face a bill as high as £64,000, before taxes, for a bumper day.

While I didn’t get much on my wet outing in Hutton-le-Hole it does bring to mind the work of photographer Tessa Bunney who produced an excellent series of images called ‘Moor and Dale’ which documented the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty between 2001-3 in the North Yorkshire moorland.

Mapped out by three rivers and defined by grouse moorland, heather covered bog and dry heath, this is ‘a community in a state of unprecedented change’. As an outsider, Tessa Bunney was commissioned to investigate and record, with an impartial view and an eye for interpretation, the people and culture within six hundred and thirty three square kilometres of Nidderdale.

As Anne McNeill, Director of Impressions Gallery writes: “colour plays a large part in Bunney’s images. Cobalt blue skies with cumulus clouds; glimpses of vibrant red; hints of monochrome in the eggs of lapwings and mallards, all bring seemingly banal moments to our attention. By homing in on details – the macro close up of blue twine spilling from a Barbour jacket; a handful of heather seeds; a sprig of whisker like bog cotton, gently blowing in the wind, our eyes are being drawn to the unseen in such a way that makes us look again, that makes us look properly at a way of life that should not go unnoticed.”

Gamekeeper © Tessa Bunney, 2002

Red Grouse © Tessa Bunney, 2002

Flanker © Tessa Bunney, 2002

Birdman © Tessa Bunney, 2002

This work was exhibited at the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate in 2004 and was part of the Hereford Photography Festival, 2004.

Writing about the photographs, Bunney says “Although the views in Nidderdale are spectacular, I enjoy photographing details which otherwise might remain unnoticed. The peat lines on the gamekeepers hands showing a lifetime of work on the moor, the different cloth caps of the farmer and his two sons concentrating on the job in hand and the way the grouse beater ties his flag to the stick as it has been done for generations are all things which interest me. In each photograph I have also tried to include an element of the landscape. This might be an expanse of open moorland or it could just be a glimpse of a drystone wall or barn in the background.”

You can see more of Bunney’s photographs from the series here.

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You may have noticed a few changes to this website over the past couple of days (including the colour change). Please bear with me while pages are added and new content is uploaded. Thanks!

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I spent this evening rooting through various photography books in the Fatamorgana library again and came across an intriguiging book called Portrait of England (M Joseph, 1976) by the black American photographer Sylvester Jacobs.

Jacobs was born in Olkahoma in 1944 and moved to London in the late 1960s where he began working for the Radio Times and Daily Telegraph Magazine. In 1973, the Victoria and Albert museum mounted a travelling exhibition entitled ‘Three Photographers’, one of whom was Jacobs.

In his foreword to the book, Jacobs writes: “I have tried in my own way to photograph and understand those qualities that are both human and personal without making any attempt to be exhausitve or laying stress on the social or the political.” He is concerned with what he describes as “the phenomena of the personality”, the understanding of England, private and public, through the features of faces.

The 270 black and white photographs in the book are split in a series of chapters, which include – Lord Mayor’s Show, Penhurst Fete, On the train, Eton, The hunt, Chipping Norton School, Stow Fair, Markets and the Motor Show.

Reviewing the book Marina Vaizey from the Sunday Times wrote “As a visual essay on aspects of English life it is full of character and free from whimsy. Neither quaint nor too cosy, it’s both gritty and gentle, and appealingly affectionate.”

One of the only references I can find about Jacobs or his work on the internet is in an essay by Peter Marshall where he writes about the work of Tony Ray-Jones from 2005:

“Ray-Jones was also noted for his stinginess, (the kind of guy who would never pay for anything if it could be avoided and insisted on restaurant bills being scrupulously divided up so he only paid for what he had eaten). But to other photographers he could be extremely generous with his time and advice, giving long and detailed criticisms and other help. One who benefited from this was Sylvester Jacobs, a young black American photographer who was working on a similar project to his (though very differently) published in 1976 as ‘Portrait of England’.”

There appears to be a portait of Jacobs on this blog, along with a number of his old students who are trying to track him down.

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This week I’m teaching a summer workshop at Fatamorgana (The Danish School of Art Photography) and have just come across a copy of Ian Berry’s The English (Penguin Books, 1978) in the school’s library. This small paperback book contains one hundred wonderfully insightful portraits from around the country taken by Berry in the mid 1970s. The work was funded by the first Arts Council Photography Bursary.

Berry was born in Preston, Lancashire and internationally known as a Magnum Photographer. He made his reputation in South Africa, where he worked for the Daily Mail and later for Drum magazine. He was the only photographer to document the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960, and his photographs were used in the trial to prove the victims’ innocence.

Most of the photographs in ‘The English’ were taken during 1975, although he photographed for two and a half years in total. Predominantly turning his camera on the people, rather than the landscapes, he photographed old and young of all classes; at home, at work, at leisure and the result is a sensitive portrayal of the nation or as Berry says “a personal exploration of English life.”

Whitby, Yorkshire

Country fair, Wiltshire (left) & Poole, Dorset (right)

Gateshead, Tyne and Wear (left) & Port Erin, Isle of Man (right)

Earl’s Court Motor Cycle Show, London (left) & Battersea Town Hall, London (right)

Royal Ascot Races (left) & Derby Day at Epsom Racecourse (right)

In his foreword to the book, Berry writes “thought I was born and grew up in the North of England, I was in the odd situation of being English and knowing very little about England, having spent much of my life abroad.” After a year documenting he concludes “England has changed less in the 15 years away than I thought – or at any rate what I photographed had changed less than I had expected. Also, England is the easiest country in the world in which to take photographs – in the way people react or rather do not react in the photographers’ presence.”

Most of the photographs were taken on Leica cameras with 28mm, 35mm and 50mm lenses on Ilford film (HP4 an HP5).

Doctor’s waiting room, Battersea, London

Durham (left) & Whitechapel, London (right)

Harrods Department Store, London (left) & Jarrow, Tyne and Wear (right)

New Year’s Eve, Trafalgar Square, London (left) &  Crufts Dog Show, London (right)

Horden, County Durham (left) & Leadenhall Market, London (right)

Serpentine Gallery, London (left) & Pub in Hansworth, near Birmingham (right)

There’s currently one used copy of the book listed on Amazon for £70.00.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Berry commented that his dream project would be to update his book on the English. I hope he gets the chance.

Whitby, Yorkshire (left) & Health farm near Haywards Heath, Sussex (right)

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I’m thrilled to announce that We English will officially launch at Klompching Gallery in New York on Thursday 10th September.

Keynes Country Park Beach, Shornecote, Gloucestershire, 11th May 2008 © Simon Roberts

This will be my second solo show at the gallery, following on from Motherland, which formed the gallery’s inaugural exhibition in October 2007. Signed books will be available and I will also be doing an artist talk, details to follow shortly.

Opening reception: 10th September, 6-8pm

Gallery address: 111 Front Street, Suite 206, Brooklyn, NY 11201. See the map here.

Gallery hours: Wed- Sat, 11am – 6pm Extended Hours: 1st Thursdays, 11am – 8:30pm. Private appointments available upon request.

For more information- tel: +1 212 796 2070 or email: info@klompching.com

The exhibition runs until 23rd October.

Slightly closer to home, a selection of prints will also be on show at The Photographers’ Gallery, London from 1st September – 18th October. I will also be doing an artist talk and book signing on 30th September. Details of which can be found here.

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