I’ve been looking at Geoffrey Grigson’s book Britain Observed; the Landscape Through Artist’s Eyes (Phaidon Press, 1975) where he examines some seventy artists from Rubens to Victor Pasmore and looks at how they have reacted to the landscapes of England, Scotland and Wales. His approach is emotional rather than art-historical and the result is what he calls ‘a book of art and a book of places’.
There’s an interesting chapter called Landscape journeys where Grigson studies J.M.Turner’s sketchbooks to get an understanding of how the artist worked. He writes-
“Summer, especially early summer, when the light was more vigorous and there was less chance of rain and cold, was the time for such professional expeditions, for finding and sketching views, for building up a stock of drawings of every chance thing, every mass of trees or movement of water of deployment of clouds or waddling ducks, which might come into the finished pieces to be worked up, through autumn and winter, for patrons for the exhibitions, for the aquatint publishers.”
There’s a particularly revealing section where Grigson highlights the importance of Turner’s patrons to his summer itinerary-
“The way to sales and livelihood was not to wander off and please yourself. The painter worked in neighbourhoods which attracted the well-to-do summer ‘tourists’ and their families, he sketched the ruined abbeys, the waterfalls, the harbour, the rocking stone they might like to remember and admire again in a drawing-room portfolio of watercolours…..the expedition had to be planned carefully and carried out economically. There were orders to be arranged ahead of travel, there were patrons to be visited en route for new orders or in search of payment for views already ‘taken’ and delivered.”
Several of Turner’s early sketchbooks show how the artists worked out his itineraries, listing his mileage, and placing beforehand the castles, churches, the abbeys, the bridges and so on, which might be worth sketching.
From a sketchbook of 1974, Turner then ninetten years old:
Derby; near which is Dale Abbey.
Nottingham, 3 Churches, St. Mary, Gothic, a large Castle, romantic situated. In the Market Place, one end   Justice, the other a Cross supported by 4 Doric Columns. A Bridge of 19 arches.
Linton, a mile from N., a Abbey.
At Southill or Southwell is a Collegiate Church. There is remains a Battlement Tower of a Castle N.
Newark, a Bridge, a Gothic Church and Castle.
At Stamford, R. of a Castle.
At Crowland a triangular Bridge, pure Gothic. Great part of the Abbey still remains the Steeple, with the West isle, with carv’d Figure.
Peterborough Cathedral.
A large number of Turner’s sketchbooks (nearly 300) were bequest to the Tate after his death. You can see extensive samples of them on the Tate’s website here. (See the screenshot above).
You can read two previous blog posts I’ve made about Turner here and here.
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“Sitting comfortably, I open my copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life.” So begins Keiller’s video take of a “peripatetic study of the problem of England” conducted by the deadpan Robinson and his long-suffering mate. A mysterious advertising agency has tasked Robinson with investigating the ‘problem of England’. He and the narrator embark on a series of seven journeys across England, inspired by Daniel Defoe‘s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, based on Defoe’s travels as a spy in the 1720s. Paul Scofield narrates a series of illuminating snippets of information as the itinerant camera focuses on one provincial backwater after another.
Guardian writer Robert Clark describes the film as “like being lucky enough to get stuck on a train next to somebody’s utterly erudite and slightly potty grandfather. If you sometimes get fed up with the state of England, watch this. It won’t change a thing, other than cheering you up no end.”
Another film I watched recently was Gallivant (1996) by filmmaker Andrew Kötting. Gallivant is a 6,000-mile journey zig-zagging around the coast of Britain, which is both an experimental travelogue and an intensely personal story. Kötting begins the journey to bring Gladys, his 85-year old grandmother, and Eden, his 7-year old daughter, together. Gladys’s stamina is limited, and Eden has Joubert’s syndrome: she’s not expected to live to adulthood. Both are fragile, and the journey is an opportunity which may not be repeated.
This road trip film is part homage to the unsung eccentrics who make up our national identity, and part tribute to the bonds of family. It’s a tender film, definitely worth watching.
One of the wonderful things about the road trip are the random scenes that one comes across. Those unexpected moments and chance encounters which create a lasting impression or, one hopes, a lasting photograph. Two spectacular examples of this would be Joel Sternfeld’s ‘Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington’ (1979) and ‘McLean, Virgina’ (1978), both from American Prospects (discussed below).
There’s an interesting article by Liz Jobey on The Guardian website called ‘Photographer Joel Sternfeld: close encounters’, from October 17 2008, which you can read here.
In her article, Jobey comments on these two pictures- “The first shows an elephant collapsed in the middle of a suburban highway with a truck, a small group of onlookers and the sheriff in attendance. The other depicts a farmer’s market, with a stack of orange pumpkins out front; in the background a house is on fire with flames pouring from its roof. The flames are exactly the same shade of orange as the pumpkins. A customer standing casually at the market with a pumpkin under one arm turns out to be a fireman, bagging a pumpkin or two while his colleagues tackle the blaze. In the present photographic climate, such pictures might have been assumed to be fictions, but in Sternfeld’s case they were repayment for his diligence; chance encounters in the strange and disturbing reality of American life.”
I’m putting myself on the line a bit here but, while not having quite the same fortune as Sternfeld, I did enjoy a series of chance encounters during the journey which resulted in some interesting pictures. In one case, while driving to Stonehenge in Wiltshire, we passed by the Avebury Stone Circle. On turning the corner of the road we were confronted with a very surreal scene: about a dozen men and women performing Amerta Movement on and around the rocks that make up the stone circle. I nearly crashed the motorhome on seeing it and after gaining my composure, pulled over and dashed out with my camera to try and capture the scene.
Here is one of the frames I took (unfortunately the size of reproduction here doesn’t do it justice) –
The photograph shows a number of people doing a series of Amerta moves around the stones, while others lay in the grass with their legs in the air. There is a ring of clothes and bags to the left of the picture. The exercices were part of a ‘Human Nature Ritual Art’ workshop being led by Suprapto Suyodarmo, from Indonesia, who created the Amerta Movement. He also features in the background of the photograph.
Amerta Movement is the original name of specific type of work with body based on natural movement and meditation. He takes advantages from simple elements of movement like: sitting, swimming, walking and recumbent posture. He uses two forms of meditation. One of them it is so called Sumarah, based on relaxation of body, mind and emotions, undergoing to movement and intuition of body. The second it is Vipasana during which man is concentrated over thoughts, emotions and impressions flowing from his inside. This is a type of deeper and more conscious meditation.
For ‘Roadtrip’ the artists found a carousel of slides, mostly of empty landscapes, that originally belonged to George’s grandfather. His grandfather, whom he had never met, had traveled across Canada to meet with a doctor in New York for the cancer that he was dying from. The slides are projected onto a screen, while out of two audio speakers a conversation between the artists can be heard discussing the order and reason for the slides, trying to discover the mystery behind the images.
And of course we should also look at the work by some contemporary American photographers who have been inspired by Frank, Sternfeld and Shore. Here are three series by photographers Alec Soth, Amy Stein and William Lamson, that deserve a mention.
“The title, Sleeping by the Mississippi, alludes to the recurrence of beds, a symbol found throughout Soth’s work. As he makes his way South along the Mississippi River, Soth show us the bed used by a young Charles Lindberg, photographed at his childhood home in Little Falls, Minnesota. We see the Reverend and Margaret’s bedroom, plastered with snapshots, in Vicksburg, and Sunshine, a smug grin on her face, leaning back on what appears to be a hotel bed in Memphis. If anything at all, this is a group of images about place and their inhabitants. There is no story, per se, but rather a series of unconnected dots, placed before the viewer humbly and unapologetically. Soth’s working method is meticulous and methodical, as dictated by the 8×10″ view camera he uses, and this reflects an inner methodology based in quiet, steady human relationships, abundantly evident here.”
See the full series of photographs on Alec’s website here.
“Beginning with the government’s failed response to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, the American people suffered through a series of devastating corruptions of their traditional structures of support. Stranded is a meditation on the despondence of the American psyche as certainty collapsed and faith eroded during the second term of the Bush administration. The images in this series live in the road photography tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, but where they sought to capture the American experience through “the journey,” my photographs seek to tell the story of this time through the journey interrupted.” Amy Stein, 2008
You can see the full series of photographs here and a map of Amy’s journey here.
“In September of 2004, while I was driving around America working on a project called Encounter, I began photographing myself in the landscape as a means of activating the photographic process when no other subjects presented themselves. This artistic exercise opened the door to a new way of making work that completely changed my photographic practice. I went from being an observer, trained by my interest in the American landscape photographers of the last half century, to a photographic collaborator, physically engaging with the landscape as a form of creative play. The series consists of images in which I am either performing an activity dictated in part by the location, or attempting to become part of the scene by assuming an inanimate form. In both cases, I conceal my face to emphasize the physicality of my body and its relationship to the landscape. Although this project began as an exercise, the playfulness, experimentation and sense of humor that emerged from it has come to represent the new way that I approach my work.”
You must see William’s new video work particular ‘Sublunar’. It’s wonderful.
I’m quickly running out of time before the imminent arrival of my second child (due next week) so my series on the road trip in photography is going to be much briefer than I’d originally envisioned.
In this second post I’m going to look at the work of three photographers who have each produced hugely significant photographic documents while using the road trip as a vehicle for exploring American society. The photographers are Robert Frank, Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore. In a future post, I’ll turn to the work of some European photographers who have explored their own homelands via road trips. I’m afraid that most of the text that follows has been taken from the publishing blurb. Apologies, but it’s lack of time!
Robert Frank- The Americans
“That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eig ht states in an old used car (on Guggenhiem Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genuis, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.†Jack Kerouac, from his introduction to The Americans
Robert Frank made this seminal body of work after leaving his native Switzerland, heading out on an extended road trip across the United States. First published in 1959, this book, one of the most famous and influential photography books ever published, consists of a series of photographs taken by Frank on a trip through America between 1955 and 1956 – pictures of normal people, everyday scenes, lunch counters, bus depots and cars, and the strangely familiar faces of people we don’t quite know but have seen somewhere. As Kerouac writes in his introduction, Frank’s photographs had “sucked a sad, sweet, poem out of America.” The slightly offset angles and the blurred focus of many of the photographs suggest the nervousness and dislocation of the people they capture. Frank dispels any romantic notions of the lingering pioneer spirit of America by presenting a landscape of people and places absent of hope and promise.
The Americans has just been re-released, published by Steidl, and Joel Sternfeld was on hand at Steidl’s Gottingen press to witness the process along with Robert Frank. On writing of the experience in PLUK magazine (Summer 2008) Sternfeld comments: “When I was first becoming a photographer in the late sixties his book The Americans was already a landmark – that’s much too weak a word but what other term should you use for a body of work that changed the course of the river of photography forever? I would look at it before I went to sleep and in the morning I would reach for it like a smoker reaches for a cigarette. I needed to see it again.â€
Sternfeld goes on to write: “He [Frank] has come to Europe to receive a prize in Spain but the real agenda was to see if the Switzerland of his childhood would be the right place for his final days. Surprisingly, it failed in that regard. Robert wanted to go home: to America…..He spoke of his desire to return to America, of what a good country it was that it had given him his chance…..I thought about ‘home’ and its power, and about an idea I have that many of the great practitioners photograph their ‘home’ landscapes. I had excluded Frank from my thesis because America was not his home. But now it was. A phrase ‘I did not choose this place but now I am of it’ came to mind.â€
Joel Sternfeld, American Prospects
Since publication of The Americans, many photographers have made personal journeys to take the cultural and political temperature of the United States, but none has done so with more conviction than Joel Sternfeld.
Supported, as Frank had been, by a Guggenheim fellowship, Sternfeld set off cross-country in 1978, driving a camper van. His quest, he says, was that “of someone who grew up with a vision of classical regional America and the order it seemed to contain, to find beauty and harmony in an increasingly uniform, technological and disturbing America.” The photographs that resulted would become his first, now classic book, American Prospects.
American Prospects is an exploration of the landscape as simultaneously idyllic and dystopian, reflecting on the changing states of American society. Over eight years, Sternfeld crossed the American continent in a camper van taking images of what he saw, which included the most familiar and the unexpected. The impact of this body of work continues to resonate through contemporary artistic, filmmaking and photographic practice.
Sternfeld’s angle in his photographs is that of a local. Yet his home appears to have many different facets. On the one hand, there’s the America in which he spent a sheltered youth and whose stories he heard and, on the other hand, there’s the America which he got to know on his trips after 1978: monotonous, overly technological, confusing, bizarre. On his journeys, he lost his faith in an ideal world, but he did not abandon his sense of humor and sarcasm – both are always present in his photographs.
While Sternfeld tends to shoot pictures of common people in common settings, he always manages to uncover extraordinary motifs in those ordinary scenes. His prosaic still lifes capture the irony and strangeness of everyday America in the form of monumental images. A good example is the bizarre shot of the collapsed elephant on a country road in Washington State. Are we witnessing staged reality here? We are not, since nothing is staged in Sternfeld’s shots, nothing manipulated – he just keeps showing up in the right place at the right time.
Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places
“Until I was twenty-three I lived mostly in a few square miles in Manhattan. In 1972 I set out with a friend for Amarillo, Texas. I didn’t drive, so my first view of America was framed by the passenger’s window.” Stephen Shore, 1982
Shore is one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, best known for his photographs of vernacular America taken in the early 1970s two bodies of work entitled American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. These projects paved the way for future photographers of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ such as Martin Parr, Thomas Struth, and Nan Goldin.
On July 3, 1973, Stephen Shore set out on the road again. This road trip marked an important point in his career, as he was coming to the tail end of American Surfaces and embarking on a body of work that is known as Uncommon Places, which was published by Aperture in 1982.
Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore’s images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance.
Quoting Thomas Weski, in Stephen Shore: Photographs, 1973-1993, “Although Shore’s photos also present the status quo in the America of the 1970s, they are not documentary photographs of the type produced for the police, or for architects or archaeologists. Photos of that type are produced according to set rules, so that they can later be evaluated on a scientific basis. Shore uses the stylistic methods of documentary photography, but his images are the results of a subjective vision. He therefore stands in the tradition of the photographers who shaped this apparently objective style of personal photography: Eugene Atget with his photos of Paris at the turn of the century, and Walker Evans with his photos of America at the end of the 1920s. Like those two photographers, Shore also works in series. The individual shots are placed in a sequence, in a visually complex system of references, and the cumulative effect of the photographs allows them to be viewed at several different levels.”
Shore has also just published the aptly named book A Road Trip Journal, which documents a month-long journal he kept in June 1973. In a deadpan, unemotional style, Shore’s journal itemizes where he stayed, what he ate, which television programs he watched, what photographs he took, how many miles he drove, and how many postcards he distributed on each day of his trip. The journal also includes postcards of the towns where he stayed as well as some of his own photographs alongside hotel, restaurant, and gas station receipts.
You can read an in-depth interview with Shore on Seesaw magazine here.
I managed to get to Birmingham earlier this week to see the Knight of the Camera exhibition featuring the work of Sir Benjamin Stone.
The exhibition is staged outside in Centenary Square and was designed and built by Standard 8, a company who specialise in large-scale outdoor exhibitions (previous displays include projects for Oxfam, Reuters and Tom Stoddart’s iWitness). It was a pretty miserable day and probably not the best weather to be viewing the photographs in, however, an enjoyable excursion none the less.
Although I was most interested in Stone’s photographic record of customs and festivals, it was interesting to see his series of Parliamentary photographs. As Pete James and Elizabeth Edwards identify in the introduction to the book A Record of England, Stone’s approach to the Houses of Parliament has an ethnographic quality. Illustrated, for example, in this portrait of Corporal Laxon.
Stone’s Parliamentary Diary (June 4 1908) notes: “Lunch at the House of Commons with Captain Wandsop who came with his servant Dyak from Borneo in native costume.” Whilst there is a sense of negotiation and arrangment to many of Ston’es portraits, Corporal Laxon, a former ‘Dyak Head Hunter’ and member of the Borneo Native Police, was reduced to the kind of typological representation adopted in anthropolocial studies, pictured front and side profile in both native and western dress.
There was also a panel which looked at Stone’s legacy and included the work of Tony Ray Jones, Daniel Meadows, Homer Sykes, Matthew Murray (whose work I’ve not come across before), David Moore and ongoing work by Anna Fox.
I’m Interested to see how Anna’s work develops. Called ‘Back to the Village’ it observes the uniquely English rituals that take place in the picturesque villages of Hampshire. Citing Sir Benjamin Stone as an influence, Anna is creating a collection of photographs documenting the customs – such as nativity plays, Halloween festivities and Guy Fawkes Night – that take place in thee villages. I can only find a couple of images on her website at the moment, including the one below.
“What is made in England these days? How do we relate to the contemporary English landscape? The Arts Council has commissioned some of our leading writers to start the debate. The chosen writers live and work across the country from Newcastle to Plymouth from rural locations to urban conurbations. We also wanted to reflect the different experiences and relationships writers have to the place they live in, people who are rooted to one community, people who have moved around, and people who have come to England from other countries. The pieces are also living examples of how diverse and rich the English language is – whether it is used in poetry, in fiction or in essays. These writers show us things differently; inform the way we see things; make us think freshly.”
All this week, Radio 4 are running a series of programmes where twelve of the country’s best-loved writers were commissioned to write a piece about being Made in England.
Monday 6th Oct:Â In writer Andrew O’Hagan’s essay on Englishness, he argues that whatever else we have lost we still revel in self deprecation.
Tuesday 7th Oct:Â Novelist Maggie Gee comes from Poole in Dorset, her parents are English and her parents’ parents are English. So why is her sense of identity more linked to the sea than the land?
Wednesday 8th Oct:Â Patrick Wright writes: “When I lived in East London in the early 1990s, there was one street above all that seemed beyond hope of improvement or recovery.” He reveals which one this was.
Thursday 9th Oct: A compilation of shorter prose pieces and poems including novelist Helen Dumore on Porthmeor beach in Cornwall in a haunting tale about storms, the sea and watery graves and Daljit Nagra’s ballad set in Cranford Park between Heathrow and Hounslow where a large Sikh Punjabi community have lived since the early 1960s.
Friday 10th Oct:Â Novelist Beryl Bainbridge writes about her home town of Liverpool and its architecture, which was “built in a previous century and gave a framework to my life”.
Although I’ve already mentioned Homer Sykes’ work in a recent blog post on Sir Benjamin Stone (Knight of the Camera) I felt his work on traditional British customs warranted it’s own post.Â
Born in Vancouver, Canada, Sykes has been in the UK since 1954 and working as a photographer for over 40 years. It was while studying at the London College of Printing (now LCC) between 1968-71 that he came across the work of Sir Benjamin Stone. A discovery which provided the inspiration for his book ‘Once A Year – Some Traditional British Customs’ (Pub: Gordon Fraser, 1977).
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Sykes has described his motivation for Once A Year in an interview on Luminous-Lint–
“I thought it would be interesting to re-photograph some of these customs and others I researched seventy years later, but not in a static way with a large format camera as he had, but in my own style, that I hoped would be a fusion of the American street photography genre that I loved, and had seen in MOMA in New York – Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Burk Uzzle, Robert Frank, and Bruce Davidson, (because of the way their images appear spontaneous, accidental and stylish) and that of the humanitarian reportage and documentary photography of the great Magnum photographers.
The project lasted 7 years, I travelled all over the country to take these photographs and covered about one hundred traditional events, that for the most part took place once a year. I tended to avoid folk club revival country customs, and those events that seemed to be more to do with town hall tourism than local history. As a young documentary photographer I was interested in the contemporaneity of the participants, the coexistence of ancient and modern, and of course of the documentary value of what I was doing.”
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The Burry Man (Jacko Hart), South Queensferry, Lothian, Scotland
The Burry Man with his helpers Billy Scott and David Scott in the South Queensferry Ex Servicemans Club taking a break from his perambulations of the towns boundaries (1971). 

There are reports from the nineteenth century of the Burry Man appearing in other Scottish locations when the fishing harvest was failing. The twentieth century Burry Man makes his perambulations of the town boundary on the date preceding the annual Ferry Fair. It is thought that this was once a fishing fertility rite, although these days it is associated with the local borough or burgh. The fair has been in existence since 1687, and now takes place during the second week in August. By 1971 nothing of what was once an eight day fair remained save the road race, run for a traditional pair of black boots.
It’s a beautifully photographed, tender and often humorous document. I’d love to get my hands on a copy. Unfortunately it’s out of print and a used copy will set you back £100. I think I’ll have to wait for the re-print!
For those of you who want to find out more about Skyes’ recent work, you can read an interview from 2007 on the Photo Histories website here. Â
I’ll be interested to know what Sykes thinks of my attempt at documenting England thirty years later, especially given my choice of a “static” large format camera.
I’ve just received details of an exhibition of photographs by Sir Benjamin Stone which are going on display in Centenary Square, Birmingham, from 20th September – 30 October 2008.
‘Knight of the Camera’ marks the first major display of images by the renowned Victorian amateur photographer, Sir Benjamin Stone, in his home town of Birmingham for almost a century. It follows on from the exhibition and publication project A Record of England: Sir Benjamin Stone and the National Photographic Record Association which was shown at the V&A in 2006 (more information below).
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The exhibition is being organised by Birmingham Library, where Stone’s archive is held, and will include over 100 of his most iconic images - from Parliament, customs and festivals and others such as his previously unseen photographs of the Franco-British Exhibition in London, 1908. Interestingly the exhibition will also include a ‘Legacy’ section revealing the influence of Stone’s work on subsequent generations of British photographers such as Homer Sykes, Daniel Meadows and Anna Fox. It’s being curated by Pete James who is head of Photographs at Birmingham Central Library and has undertaken extensive research on Stone’s collection for many years.
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A Record of England: Sir Benjamin Stone and the National Photographic Record Association, 1897 -1910Â
In July 1897, in a flourish of publicity, Sir Benjamin Stone – Birmingham industrialist, Member of Parliament and passionate, almost obsessive collector, announced the formation of the National Photographic Record Association. Its prime objective was to make a record of England for future generations, to foster “a national pride in the historical associations of the country, or neighbourhood, in family traditions, or in personal associations.” Over the next 13 years, Stone and his amateur supporters deposited their photographs at the British Museum. In 2000, these were moved to the V&A. This book examines Stone’s central role in the project and presents over 100 of his photographs, many of which have never been published before. It also charts the history of the NPRA and points to its legacies within photography.
The NPRA was part of a much wider photographic survey movement at the end of the 19th century, covering British archaeology, geology and ethnography. The idea of photographic surveys survives to this day, operating at many levels, from local camera clubs and community projects to the National Monuments Record. While there are strong elements of nostalgia in the NPRA, it was also dynamic as our Victorian ancestors, like us, used photography to project what they valued about their past into the future.
You can see a selection of images from the V&A exhibition here.
