“Roberts’ manner is calm.  He shows people small in the landscape, clustered into groups rather than isolated as individuals.  He likes to shoot from relatively high, so we see patterns. It is partly a show about ritual in the landscape, the strange things we do to feel we belong. It is partly about how the very numbers of us who come to enjoy the land spoil the thing we admire.  A strong theme is about movement, but Roberts shrewdly notices how much movement is local.  Playing golf still has something pastoral about it, even in the shadow of the very power station which employed you.

These elegant pictures invite multiple readings, but they do it with confidence and zest.   With flashes of wit, humanity, and abundant respect for his photographic predecessors, Simon Roberts has added a good one to the canon of surveys of the English.”

Francis Hodgson (art adviser, photography critic at the FT and former head of photographs at Sotheby’s) has just written a review of We English. You can read the full review here.

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Couple of installation shots from the We English exhibition at Centro Brasileiro Britânico, Sao Paulo.

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As the planning debate continues between various political parties, here are a couple of quotes from Geoff Dyer’s book Working the Room: Essays and Reviews: 1999-2010:

“Lawrence’s vision of England going to the dogs rings true today precisely because neither he nor anyone else was able to do anyting to prevent it. Lawrence realised that the colossal ugliness of industrialisation owas being succeeded by a different kind of blight: the spread of ‘red bricked semi-detached villas in new streets’. This had only just got under way but Lawrence saw it as evidence of the way ‘one England blots out another’.” Dyer on D.H Lawrence

Philip Larkin laments in ‘Going, Going‘ (1972) that the hole country will be ‘bricked-in’:

“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.”

“Lawrence’s and Larkin’s worst fears have been miserably realised. Contemporary England may seem far removed from the hideous industrialised Victorian image of Dickens’ Coketown, but what might be termed a ‘Swindonisation’ has taken place whereby every town looks exactly like every other. A journey through the vast bulk of England is now a journey through the almost unrelieved ugliness of post-industrial homotgenisation.” Geoff Dyer.

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We English is going to be exhibited at the British Council in Sao Paulo at the Centro Brasileiro Britânico from 11th November to 25th February 2012, shown  alongside the work of Brazilian photographer Iatã Cannabrava.

Address: Rua Ferreira Ara̼jo, 741 РPinheiros, Ṣo Paulo, Brazil
Telefone: (0xx)11 3819-4120

In association with Galeria de Babel.

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