I have a slight addiction with checking the rankings for We English on Amazon. Only once a day mind. I was amused this evening to find the book is currently ranked number 16 in the Photo Essays bestseller list following after The Big Book of Breasts by Dian Hanson!
It was an early start this morning, thanks to the kids having not yet adjusted to the clocks going back an hour on Sunday, and I found myself listening to the Shipping Forecast – the intangible and mysterious weather forecast that is broadcast daily for shipping – at 05.20am on Radio 4! And it brought to mind the wonderful series of photographs on the subject by Magnum photographer (and fellow Brighton resident) Mark Power.
Although Power is better known for his large-format colour work such as Superstructure, a documentation of the construction of London’s Millennium Dome in 2000; The Treasury Project, about the restoration of a nineteenth-century historical monument, in 2002: and 26 Different Endings (2007) which looks at those landscapes unlucky enough to fall just off the edge of the London A-Z, one of his most poetic bodies of work is The Shipping Forecast (Zelda Cheatle Press, 1996), which was made in response to the esoteric language of these daily maritime weather reports.
LUNDY. Tuesday 19 July 1994. Variable becoming westerly 2 or 3. Mainly fair. Moderate or good. © Mark Power, Magnum.
For those at, or about to put to sea, the forecast may mean the difference between life and death. But for millions of landlubbing radio listeners it is more than this; the enigmatic language of the forecast has entered the public conciousness, creating a landscape of the imagination and confirming romantic notions of Britain’s island status. In the work Power documents the 31 sea areas covered by the forecast, which include, among others, Finisterre off the north Portuguese/western Spanish coast, Biscay off the north Spanish/western French coast, the Irish Sea, and southeast Iceland.
Here are some more of Powers’ photographs from the series, all of which you can find on his website here.
Captions-
MALIN
Monday 6 September 1993. Southeast backing easterly 4 or 5, increasing 6 in the south. Mainly fair. Moderate or good.
WIGHT
Saturday 18 February 1995. Northwesterly backing southwesterly 6 or 7, increasing gale 8 for a time. Showers then rain. Good becoming moderate or poor.
FASTNET
Monday 10 April 1995. Southwesterly 3 or 4. Moderate or good.
VIKING
Tuesday 25 July 1995. Southerly 3 increaing 5 or 6. Fair. Good.
FAIR ISLE
Sunday 28 January 1996. Southeasterly 4 or 5, occasionaly 6 in southwest at first. Mainly fair. Good.
TYNE
Sunday 25 July 1993. West or southwest 3 or 4 increasing 5 or 6. Showers. Good.
HUMBER
Saturday 13 July 1996. Southwesterly veering northwesterly 4 or 5. Occasional drizzle. Moderate with fog patches.
DOGGER
Sunday 30 June 1996. West or southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Occasional rain. Mainly good.
GERMAN BIGHT
Saturday 26 August 1995. Northwesterly 5 or 6, occasionally 7 at first. Showers. Moderate or good.
FAEROES
Tuesday 6 August 1996. Mainly southerly 3 or 4. Occasional rain. Moderate or good.
FORTH
Saturday 17 December 1994. Southerly 6 to gale 8. Rain at times. Moderate or good.
PORTLAND
Tuesday 23 November 1993. Southeasterly 4, increasing 5 to 7. Showers. Moderate or good.
You can buy a first edition of the book for £250.00 or a third edition for £40.00 on Power’s website here and read a number of essays on Power’s work here.
I’m excited about a new project that Power is working on in England. Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment is a speculative mix of photographs by Power along with poems by Daniel Cockrill.
Each month, time permitting, the pair spend a few days in a different part of England, responding in pictures and words to shared experiences in a country they both love and loathe. Expected to continue until 2010, their work will be presented here as ‘work-in-progress’ on loops of different lengths, encouraging random juxtapositions to occur. The series will be added to periodically.
You can watch a slideshow of photographs set to a poem read by Cockrill here.
The Edge of England is a series of black & white photographs by Alexander Brattell made in the Hastings and Rother area of southern England between 2006-2009. An exhibition of the work is due to open at McCarrons of Mercatoria on 31st October. Read more here.
31 October – 5 December 2009
McCarrons of Mercatoria
68 Norman Rd, St Leonards On Sea, East Sussex TN38 0EJ
Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm
If you missed my talk at HOST gallery and find yourself at a loose end, you can listen to the podcast on the FOTO8 website here.
Or download the audio by saving this linked file (63MB, runtime 1h15m): http://www.foto8.com/new/audios/simonroberts.mp3
We English is featured in this month’s Flak Photo Weekend series and has partnered with publisher Chris Boot to give away three signed copies of the book. To enter, browse the Flak Photo Gallery and post a link to one of your favorite photographs on Flak Photo’s Facebook wall. Three fans will be randomly selected from the submitted posts to receive a complimentary signed copy of the book.
Deadline for entries is Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 11:59 PM CDT. More details on how to enter here.
Winners will be notified by Facebook inbox message the week of November 9, 2009.
Flak Photo is a daily photography website produced by Andy Adams that celebrates the art & culture of photography online. Produced by Andy Adams, the site highlights new series work, book projects and gallery exhibitions from an international community of contributors. Available online at www.flakphoto.com.
My exhibition of We English prints at Klompching gallery in New York closes on Saturday 24th October. If you’re in town, or passing through, I hope you get a chance to check it out.
The exhibition is reviewed by Vince Aletti in this week’s The New Yorker –
“We English,†the title of Roberts’s engrossing exhibition of large-scale color photographs (and the related book) might lead you to expect gently satiric social studies in the style of Martin Parr. But the focus of the work is primarily landscape, and several of the images are broad, handsome vistas with only a few people scattered about the terrain. Even the photographs that include larger groups were taken from a distance—a perspective that echoes classical painting, although the subjects (golfers before a line of cooling towers, race contestants sloughing through the mud of a river at low tide) are decidedly contemporary.” The New Yorker, 19.10.09
I received an unexpected gift before my talk at Host gallery last week. Fellow photographer John Wearing came up and presented me with a photograph that he’d taken after a Royal Photographic Society lecture that I’d attended back in October 1997. The photograph shows a keen young photographer -who’d recently moved to London to make his fortune – collaring the larger-than-life British photographer, Grace Robertson.
Robertson had just delivered a wonderfully inspiring lecture about her work and I was keen to meet her and hopefully show her some of my photographs (I sincerely hope that the cardboard folder under my arm wasn’t my portfolio of photographs!).
©John Wearing, 28th October 1997
Robertson was a pioneering British photojournalists of the nineteen fifties and one of the few women to hold down a career in photojournalism at that time, and even then she found it necessary to work under the pseudonym Dick Muir. She was born in Scotland in 1930. After leaving school she looked after her mother who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Her father gave her a second-hand camera in 1949 and the following year she had a photo story about her sister doing her homework published in the famous magazine Picture Post.
She worked as a freelance photographer for Picture Post (1950-7) for eight years documenting Britain’s post-war life and was known for the humour, sympathy and female perspective that she brought to her work. On the magazine she joined many of the leading photographers of the era, including Bert Hardy, Kurt Hutton, and her future husband Thurston Hopkins.
As a woman working for Picture Post she tended to be given the ‘softer’ assignments, although one of her stories, on the birth of a baby, was killed for being ‘too bloody’ (wars, evidently, were not). She also worked as a freelance for Life magazine in the 1950s. She continued to photograph while working as a teacher in the 1960s and 1970s, and began painting in the 1980s.
Robertson received an OBE for services to photography and her prints are represented by The Photographers’ Gallery, details of which you can find here.
Thanks for the memories John, although I’m not sure I needed reminding of that haircut!
Although I only looked at the UK Magnum photographers who’ve documented England, of course many of the co-operatives’ photographers have made some fantastic work here. There are too many to post up- just do a search for England on Magnum’s website. However, I couldn’t resist posting up a couple of images taken by the main man himself, Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, during the coronation of King George VI in London on 12 May 1937.
©Henri Cartier-Bresson/ Magnum Photos
I’ve just come across this video on You Tube by Bint Photographs where for some curious reason they have produced a slideshow of photographs from We English set to All I Want Now (Rain on the Roof) by Margaret MacDonald!
One of my photographs from We English has been nominated in the Imagine a New World photo competition as part of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. Please vote for the photograph in the ‘People’s favourite award’ here.
Saunton Sands, Devon, 23rd May 2008 © Simon Roberts
