Writing in today’s The Guardian, Sean O’Hagan selects his favourite photography books of the year, which include We English.

He writes: “Closer to home, the English were the subjects of two intriguing books: Simon Roberts’s We English (Chris Boot, £40) and Chris Steele-Perkins’s England, My England (Nothumbria Press, £30). Roberts’ book is a kind of gentle celebration, its images captured on a large-format 5×4-inch camera and owing as much to the English landscape painting tradition as any photographic precedent. It’s a grower. Steele-Perkins, a Magnum veteran, opts for a more sweeping documentary approach that shows the English at work and at play over the last four decades. By turns gritty and evocative, it is a book one imagines that Orwell would have liked very much.”

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Magnum photographer Martin Parr has selected my ‘Chelford car boot’ photograph from We English as his ‘Picture of the Year’ in an article published in today’s Sunday Telegraph.

Parr writes: “This image from Simon Roberts’s book We English is a modern classic. Roberts toured the country looking for view of leisure activities. By taking up an elevated position, all elements of the classic car boot are revealed, from the container and inflatable racetrack in the background to the layers of people and cars in the front. This sort of domestic recycling is a relatively recent phenomena, but it’s now an essential part of modern life.”

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Lingfield, Surrey, 24th December 2007 © Simon Roberts

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I’ve just noticed that The Caravan Gallery have launched a second volume of their incredibly successful book ‘Is Britain Great?’. Since it’s first outing in 2000, the project has grown into a cottage industry selling everything from postcards, visitor guides and journals to greeting cards, wrapping paper and prints.

From their website- “The Caravan Gallery is a mobile exhibition venue and visual arts project run by artists Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale who are on a mission to record the ordinary and extraordinary details of life in 21st century Britain. Eager to examine clichés and cultural trends, they are particularly drawn to absurd anomalies and curious juxtapositions, typical of places in transition and in the process of reinventing themselves as regeneration fever sweeps the land.

Simultaneously seduced by and suspicious of the rose-tinted tones of tourist information brochures, and frustrated by their yawning omissions, Williams and Teasdale set out in the year 2000 to redress the balance, sidestepping the brown signs and interpretation boards to see what lies beyond. Their findings constitute a substantial and ever-growing archive, a highly subjective survey-cum-tour guide to the ‘real’ Britain in the new millennium.

The Caravan Gallery, a diminutive mustard model (circa 1969), with white walls and beech floor on the inside (like a ‘real’ gallery), provides the perfect setting for an evolving exhibition of  photographs made in response to places visited; at any one venue, location-specific work arising from a previous research visit is exhibited alongside other material from the Caravan Gallery archive.”

“Audience diversity and social inclusion are fundamental to our project. The Caravan Gallery project is accessible to all and operates in a range of public and highly visible locations. Although access to the caravan itself may be difficult (although not impossible) for people with certain physical disabilities, we will ensure that provision is made for full participation in the area set up around the caravan. This could include taking part in surveys, looking at exhibits and shows in an adjoining marquee etc. People unable to enter the caravan can view a certain amount from the outside and are able to look at a portfolio containing images displayed inside the caravan.”

Here are a sample of the photographs, taken from their online gallery-

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Staying on the theme of films (see my last post), here are some of my favourite England-related movies, in no particular order.

KES by Ken Loach (1969)

WITHNAIL & I by Bruce Robinson (1986)

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE by Stephen Frears (1985)

A ROOM FOR ROMEO BRASS or THIS IS ENGLAND by Shane Meadows (1999 & 2006)

O DREAMLAND or IF… – Lindsay Anderson (1956 & 1968)

LAST RESORT or MY SUMMER OF LOVE by Pawel Pawlikowski (2000 & 2004)

ROBINSON IN SPACE by Patrick Keiller (1997)

RADIO ON by Christopher Petit (1979)

CARRY ON CAMPING by Gerald Thomas (1969)

BHAJI ON THE BEACH by Gurinder Chadha (1997)

GALLIVANT by Andrew Kotting (1996)

SECRETS & LIES by Mike Leight (1996)

If there are any you haven’t seen, why not check one or two out over the Christmas break? Rather than a re-run of The Great Escape or Gold Finger! Does anyone have any other suggestions?

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Last night I watched the fabulous film, Sleep Furiously (2007) by Gideon Koppel, a documentary love-letter to Trefeurig, the Welsh farming community in Ceredigion where he grew up, and where his parents found refuge from Nazi Germany during the second world war. The film is a portrait of a landscape and population that is changing rapidly as the old ways and generation are dying out. It reminded me of the photographs of James Ravilious from rural Devon.

Here’s the trailer-

And watch a question and answer session with director Gideo Koppel from May 2009 here-

And read a review of the film by Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian.

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We English features in a roundup of the year’s best photography books in today’s Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.

New York art critic Richard B. Woodward writes in the Wall Street Journal: “Most of us experience nature along pathways and shorelines trodden for decades, if not centuries. This rueful truth is known in the bones of the English, who have pieced and parceled their half of an island since the Bronze Age. Simon Roberts gently mocks his compatriots as they search for weekend inspiration in these well-groomed landscapes, even as he reminds us why such lovely places were, and still could be, wellsprings for poetry.”

While Prudence Hone writes in The Guardian: “[Massimo] Vitali might recognise something of his style in We English by Simon Roberts (Chris Boot, £35); from the Camel estuary to Kirkby Lonsdale, the dreamy panoramas, with their sweeping skies and miniature figures, are a lyrical reminder of the beauty of the countryside. There is a tranquility and charm in these documentary shots which is in stark contrast to the up-the-nostril, harshly lit studies in Luxury by Roberts’s stablemate Martin Parr (Chris Boot, £25).”

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I’ve just returned from Bradford where I was exploring the archives of the National Media Museum with the help of Ruth Kitchin Assistant, Curator of Photographs, and Brian Liddy, Curator of Collections Access (pictured). We were also joined by Stephen Daniels, Professor of Cultural Geography at Nottingham University (and author of the essay in We English). Ruth and I are curating an accompanying exhibition of photographs from the Museum’s collection that extend, and hopefully illuminate, my We English series, and will include works by the likes of Roger Fenton, Tony Ray-Jones and John Davies. More details to follow.

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