Prints from We English will be included in a survey exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, which presents work I’ve been making since 2005 after the completion of my Russian series, Motherland.

More information here: http://www.mamm-mdf.ru/en/exhibitions/landscape-studies-of-a-small-island/

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Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr
21 September 2013 – 16 March 2014

The first major exhibition at the new Media Space in London will be Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr, drawing from the Tony Ray-Jones archive at the National Media Museum. The exhibition is curated by Greg Hobson, curator of Photographs at the National Media Museum, and Martin Parr has been invited to select works from the Tony Ray-Jones archives.

Find out more about the exhibition here: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/plan_your_visit/exhibitions/only_in_england.aspx

About Media Space-

Opening in September 2013, Media Space will showcase the National Photography Collection held by the National Media Museum through a series of major exhibitions. A collaboration between the Science Museum and the National Media Museum, Media Space will also invite photographers, artists and the creative industries to respond to the wider collections of the Science Museum Group to explore visual media, technology and science.

Media Space will be based on the second floor of the Science Museum. It is a £4 million capital project and will include a 500 m² gallery for major exhibitions, a Virgin Media Studio for installations, events and creative workshops, and a café/bar. Hannah Redler was announced as Head of Media Space and Science Museum Arts Programme in 2012.

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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.

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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.”

You can read the whole review here.

And you can see a slideshow with some of the images exhibited on the Guardian’s website here.

Landmark: The Fields of Photography at Somerset House from 14 March – 28 April 2013.

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Photograph: Amerta Movement Workshop, Avebury Henge, Wiltshire, 2nd June 2008 © Simon Roberts, from We English

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.

Exhibition hashtag: #LandmarkExhibition

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An exhibition of We English will be on show at the Phos cultural centre in Torino, Italy from 31st January to 1st March 2013.

Join us for the opening on January 31st 2013, 6.30 pm.

Please see the centre’s website for more details- http://www.phosfotografia.com/en/event/we-english/

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We English is currently being exhibited at 4RT Contemporary in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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We English exhibited as part of the 19th edition of the Noorderlicht International Photofestival at the Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen, The Netherlands.

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.

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I’m part of this group exhibition – Observers: Photographers of the British Scene from the 1930’s to now – 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 is the first exhibition ever staged in Brazil to chart a course through British photography in modern times.  It spans almost a century -  from the new photographic directions of the 20s and 30s that developed alongside the emergence of mass media, to the diverse practice of today’s image-laden world – and features the work of many of Britain’s most significant, celebrated and influential photographers.

The exhibition takes Britain itself as subject -  its society and culture, places and people – presenting the work of those photographers who, rather than looking at the world beyond or at inner worlds, focused their attention on their own country  – on the customs, character and conditions of those around them . As such, it explores a fertile and dominant strand of subject matter, changing over the century – a swathe of British social and cultural history – and a broad tradition of documentary practice which has always been at the core of British photography.

It explores the ways in which humanist and social documentary modes emerged as a dominant force, the motivations and conditions that sustained these modes – professional, artistic and political -  and the ways in which they have been challenged, changed and superseded. The photographs on display draw on, or work against, a variety of visual codes, clichés and conventions.  They cross genres from the urban street scene to landscape and the portrait, and touch on an extraordinary range of subjects, from celebrity and high society to gritty realism and subversive street culture. Photographers adopt varied positions from detached voyeur to committed participant; the photographs portray attitudes of nostalgia or rebellion, moods of elation and despair.  Throughout, the exhibition questions its own premises, asking what, if anything, can be portrayed in images of the essential character of a people over time; and it asks questions of the nature of the photographic medium itself, and the uses to which it has been put.

Around 30 photographers are included, each represented by a number of photographs drawn from significant projects or series; including Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt, Humphrey Spender, George Rodger, Paul Nash, Madame Yevonde, Nigel Henderson, Roger Mayne, Ida Kar, Norman Parkinson, Terence Donovan, Ian Berry, Shirley Baker, Tony Ray-Jones, Raymond Moore, Paul Trevor, Tish Murtha, Daniel Meadows, Chris Killip, Martin Parr, Paul Graham, Keith Arnatt, Anna Fox, Derek Ridgers, Peter Fraser, Jem Southam, Karen Knorr, Richard Billingham, Paul Seawright, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jason Evans, Nigel Shafran,  Rut Blees Luxemburg, Sarah Jones, John Duncan, Gareth McConnell.

I’m represented with some prints from We English.

Significant publications – photo books and illustrated magazines, will be included in a documentary section alongside, and there is potential for an accompanying programme of documentary film which would extend the scope of the exhibition and point to significant moments of intersection between documentary photography and film, particularly in the 30s, 60s and 80s, and now.

You can read an article by curator John Kulcsár here.

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