Image: “Sofa Salesman,” 1979.

There is a wonderful feature on the photographs of  John Myers, which has just published on the New Yorker’s website under the headline ‘The Essence of Britishness, Through the Eyes of an Under-Recognized Portrait Photographer’ by Rebecca Mead.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-essence-of-britishness-through-the-eyes-of-an-under-recognized-portrait-photographer

Myers work was shot throughout the 1970s in the West Midlands, and his pictures have a uniquely British feel to them. The Portraits will be the only complete collection of Myer’s portraiture work ever published, and we are excited to be bringing this master of portrait and setting to a wider audience. The Portraits is limited to 450 copies; each copy of the book will include a 5×4” original silver gelatin print. In addition, copies 1-50 will also contain a 10×8” silver gelatin print. There is a separate portfolio edition of 8 with accompanying presentation box of 12 9.5×12” silver-gelatin prints. Both the 10×8″ print and the set of 9.5×12″ prints are selenium-toned.

John Myers was born in 1944. His photographs were taken between 1972 and 1983 using a 5 x 4 inch Gandolfi plate camera.

RRB Photobooks have just published a book of John’s portraits available here: https://www.rrbphotobooks.com/pages/john-myers-the-portraits

23rd April 2018
Binding Hardcover
Size 250 x 285 mm
Extent 176 pages
ISBN 9781999727512

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We English by Simon Roberts, “Banal Nationalism” in Landscape? is a journal article by Karine Chambefort-Kay, Université Paris-Est Créteil, from the new issue of Journée d’études, entitled “The American and British Nations in Contemporary Landscape Photography” (December 2014)

Abstract
This paper studies the case of a landscape photography project by British photographer Simon Roberts: We English—the project comprising the book published by Chris Boot in 2009, exhibitions of the large format prints of the photographs, and the artist’s dedicated website with a blog and forum for the public to propose subjects. We address the question of English national identity in Simon Roberts’s photos through the concept of “banal nationalism” coined in 1995 by Michel Billig. The first part draws on Billig’s thesis that the nation is “flagged” in the most banal everyday environment and activities, and discusses whether Simon Roberts’s documentary photographs evidence such subliminal national “flagging”. The second part shows the limits of the concept of “banal nationalism” when studying We English because of the complex, collaborative and reflexive nature of the project. By revealing how personal and intertextual references inform both the photographer’s and the viewer’s perception, the artist documents the dialectical process and negotiations at work in national identification. The third part contends that this dynamic approach of Englishness allows Roberts to propose his own re-imagining of the homeland.

On writing about my working practice for the project, Chambefort-Kay comments:

“A vast framework of references is the backbone of the whole project, and it is made visible through various devices. Simon Roberts opts for transparency on the genealogy of his pictures and on his authorial choices. He questions himself and his audience on the cultural filters and the modes of perception that inform their understanding of landscape. Therefore it is crucial to take into account the whole project, that is, to include both the blog and the pictures in our analysis to appreciate the full scope and impact of We English. Beyond merely documenting the English outdoors, Simon Roberts reveals the different ways in which people connect with the landscape both in nature and in pictures. He offers an insight into the mechanisms through which the national community is constantly re-created in landscape, showing that everything is negotiated individually and collectively.”

And in conclusion, writes:

“We English offers a renewed vision of England. New forms of cohesion and belonging are evidenced, but they are not exclusively found in urban areas. Simon Roberts does not reject the national frame, but reinvents it, by revealing the interactions and relations involved in national identification. The photographs of We English and the whole project actually display the openness of conviviality, which “makes a nonsense of closed, fixed and reified identity and turns attention toward the always unpredictable mechanisms of identification” (Gilroy, 2005, xvi). The nation is re-imagined through a new, dynamic, open vision of England.”

You can download a pdf of the full article here.

Chambefort-Kay recently completed a PhD entitled “Ecritures photographiques des identités collectives, Grande-Bretagne, 1990-2010”, which deals with many British photographers and exhibitions from the period and includes some chapters about We English and The Election Project.

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Perspectives on place: theory and practice in landscape photography (Bloomsbury, 2015)

“Simon Roberts’s major project We English is a survey of the contemporary English landscape and picks out peculiarities and eccentricities, as well as more commonplace activities of its inhabitants. While the project is likely to be immediately accessible to British audiences, there is a danger this kind of project might leave foreign audiences at loss as to how to interpret the subject matter or even how to confine a nation to conformed stereotypes.

Roberts’s work has been compared to Martin Parr’s Think of England (2001), which isolates English stereotypes more explicitly. Roberts’s photographs are, of course, created and read in a landscape paradigm. The photographer looks specifically at the diversity of English leisure activities in relation to the landscape, ranging from the bizarre – the annual Mad Maldon Mud Race in Essex – to the intimate – Roberts’s photograph of the South Downs in Sussex shows what we assume is a young couple relaxing in a field, a curious echo of the pastoral motif of young villagers courting. As well as the presentation of clichés, such as the couple picnicking barely a few meters away from their car in the Yorkshire Dales, Roberts challenges stereotypes about the English landscape.”

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The odd yet unmistakeable character of English country life is revealed in Andy Sewell’s new book, ‘Something like a Nest’.

View the images here.

“Andy Sewell’s photographs are clearly a record of the countryside. But his pictures are about something less obvious: the redundancy of the ideas we have about the pastoral when they come up against modern life. As a knitting together of the artificial and unmade, the English countryside is a perfect expression of our unstable world. Sewell shows us a landscape governed by forces beyond individual or collective control. He doesn’t mind if we are provoked. He’s happy to make us laugh. There isn’t something he needs us to believe. He doesn’t want to shatter our illusions, merely quieten them – to allow us to see the complexity of what’s before us.” Financial Times

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Estuary England is a short film exploring the area around the Queen Elizabeth II Crossing at West Thurrock. It is the first part in a wider PhD study by Simon Robinson exploring the Thames Gateway region and the pull of the contemporary ‘empire of London’ in its surrounding satellite towns.

Estuary England from Simon Robinson on Vimeo.

Robinson is currently working on an AHRC funded practice based PhD, entitled Archipelagos of Interstitial Ground: Investigating edgelands in the UK through photographic practice at the University Of Arts London, working out of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC).

You can follow his progress via his blog Driving Thru Wasteland here: simonleerobinson.wordpress.com

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Over the life of the We English blog I’ve attempted to add references to other photographic works which have explored notions of the English landscape and Englishness. You can see several of them on my Photographic Timeline and under Other Studies. Of course this is by no means an exhaustive list, rather an organic one which I rely on others to assist in building.  I was therefore delighted to receive an email from a reader of the blog, Peter Hamilton, who was kind enough to suggest several books I’d missed. I’ve published the email below and added web links.

Please do email me with any more suggestions, or post them on the blog below. Thanks!

“I was very glad to see you have discovered Edwin Smith. Smith is important to mention because his books (for instance English Parish Churches, first pub 1952) conform to an earlier, broader and essentially illustrative photographic literature that is also about English landscape and thus Englishness – the modern form of “monographic” or “survey” work on particular places, communities, localities, etc being a far more recent thing, apart from some rare earlier and notable examples (cf. PH Emerson‘s work on East Anglia from the 1880s). Nonetheless, detailed photographic inventories of specific locales certainly existed in the 19th century as the source material for a market in postcards and prints for commercial sale.

As you will know, most of Smith’s work (apart from the didactic but fascinating volumes he wrote and illustrated for Focal Press) was done under commission from publishers to illustrate books on a particular topic, usually with a “known” writer (what the French term a “locomotive littéraire”). During his career there really was hardly any scope (or more properly market) for what we would call a photobook in the sense that it has come to have in recent years, and which is now in many ways a somewhat distorting lens for seeing the history of photography (though of course it does describe one contemporary paradigm for photographic publication).

It could be argued that historically-speaking the majority of the most influential photographic books have probably not been “photobooks” as defined in the Parr et al sense. In terms of launching public interest in photography for instance, the impact of the “Family of Man” book from 1955 was probably immensely greater than that of Frank’s “Americans“, which itself was far outdistanced even within the smaller circles of enthusiast photographers by HC-B’s “Decisive Moment/Images à la sauvette” of 1951. There are generational aspects to this question, of course.

So I think you could add several of the Smith books to the list – such as Parish Churches, England (with G. Grigson), English Cottages and Farmhouses, etc. There is a good bibliography in Elwall (here is link to Elwall’s article on Culture 24 ‘Edwin Smith: from English parish to Pompeii‘)

But my main point was to offer a couple of other practical suggestions/corrections on the Photographic Timeline re Ravilious and others.

Firstly, on James Ravilious.

His first book which I think should figure on your list was (1980) The Heart of the Country, with Robin Ravilious, London, Scolar Press. This displayed the first fruits of his work for Beaford Trust on North Devon land and people from c.1972.

In 2005 he published A Corner of England: North Devon Landscapes and People, Tiverton, Devon Books and Lutterworth Press. This also contains examples of his colour work, though the book was very poorly printed.

Can I also suggest you refer to An English Eye in its first edition (1998, Devon Books, Tiverton but printed quite well by Jackson Wilson in Leeds). The 2007 volume published by The Bardwell Press and printed by EBS in Verona is the 2nd edition, better printed though hardly changed except for the bibliography and couple of minor corrections.

In 2000 Down the Deep Lanes was published, with a text by Peter Beacham. This was a thematic book about characteristic aspects of the South-West’s landscape, vernacular architecture and rural communities using some photographs from the Beaford project, but mainly others specially made for it in Devon and Cornwall up to 1999, the year of Ravilious’s death. It was re-published in 2008 in a slightly revised second edition, again by The Bardwell Press.

Other work on England I think you might note:

John Berger and Jean Mohr  (1967) A fortunate man: The story of a country doctor (1969, Penguin)

Chris Chapman (2000) Wild Goose and Riddon, Tiverton; Halsgrove.

Chris Chapman and James Crowden (2005) Silence at Ramscliffe, Oxford The Bardwell Press.

Patrick Sutherland and Adam Nicolson (1987) Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels, London, Michael Joseph.

Adrian Arbib (2009) Solsbury Hill; Chronicle of a Road Protest, Oxford, The Bardwell Press.

Ian Beesley‘s work is interesting but is not easily accessible in book form for some reason.

John Davies (1987) Green and Pleasant Land, Manchester, Cornerhouse, was very influential, I believe.”

Peter Hamilton, 14 January 2014

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Brighton Beach, 1952

(Gelatin silver print, 14 1/2 x 20 inches, 2010)

© Edwin Smith / RIBA British Architectural Library Photographs Collection

I’ve recently been made aware of the work of Edwin Smith (1912 – 1971), the English architectural and landscape photographer (I’m slightly embarrassed to say I’d not come across his work before embarking on We English).

Here’s a short bio from the V&A’s website (they hold a collection of his prints) – Smith’s photographs illustrated many books dealing with ‘English Cottages and Farmhouses‘ (1954), ‘English Parish Churches‘ (1952) and ‘Hatfield House‘ (1973). From the Second World War onwards,  Smith began to look at rural Britain and architectural subjects. In the 1950’s, he illustrated a number of books on the landscape and architecture of Britain, including English Parish Churches, English Cottages and Farmhouses and The English Gardens. By the time of his death in 1971 Smith had illustrated more than 30 such volumes. Apart from these numerous book commissions, he often photographed simply to note and capture nuances of civic life. His photographs are testimony to the sympathetic approach he adopted towards British life and landscape.

You can see a selection of Smith’s prints at Chris Beetles gallery in London and on their website here.

And there’s more about Smith’s work at these links-

http://www.fine-photographs.co.uk/index.php/life-work/es-life-work-list

http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/vexhibit/_PHOTOGRAPHER_Edwin__Smith_01/2/0/0/

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/name/edwin-smith/41201/

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I recently asked a curator friend who they thought was one of the most important photographers working in Britain over the past twenty years, whose work has not received the recognition it deserves. The curator’s unequivocal response was Tom Wood.

Wood was born in West Ireland in 1951 and now lives in North Wales (where he moved in 2003). Much like Ian Macdonald and Graham Smith (see previous blog post), Wood has chosen to work over the past 25 years almost exclusively in a small geographical area, photographing predominantly in Merseyside and Liverpool. Working primarily on the street and in pubs and clubs, Wood photographed the public face of New Brighton (made famous by Martin Parr in his book The Last Resort), across the river from Liverpool, from the late 1970’s until he moved away in 2003. For much of his time in Merseyside, Wood worked with portraiture “ranging from refined, tonally elegant depictions to informal moments of gesture and interaction from everyday life, captured through the lens with a vision at once tender, vulgar and beautiful.” (from the press release for Wood’s exhibition of The Chelsea Reach).

The Chelsea Reach includes photographs from Wood’s Looking for Love series, taken in his local disco pub between 1984 and 1987. By the time Wood started working in the club he either knew or recognised by sight many of its clientele – some of the faces belonged to young people he had photographed on the streets years before. His observations possess a raw closeness without being voyeuristic. Here are some of his photographs from the project –

Untitled, 1982-86 from The Chelsea Reach © Tom Wood

Untitled, 1982-86 from The Chelsea Reach © Tom Wood

Untitled, 1982-86 from The Chelsea Reach © Tom Wood

Untitled, 1982-86 from The Chelsea Reach © Tom Wood

Untitled, 1982-86 from The Chelsea Reach © Tom Wood

Wood’s recent solo shows include The Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, Denmark; Foam Fotomuseum, Amsterdam; Musee de l’Elysse, Lucanne. His work can also be found in the public collections of MoMA, New York; The International Centre for Photography, New York; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

There are several publications of his work, most of which are out of print: Bus Odyssey (Hatje Cantz, 2001); People (Wienand Verlag Koln, 1999); All Zones Off Peak (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1998); Looking for Love (Cornerhouse Publications, 1989); and Photieman (Steidl, 2005).

The publishing blurb for the latter says: “For 25 years Tom Wood lived in New Brighton, just across the river Mersey from Liverpool. He became known locally as ‘photie man’ because everyday he was out on the streets with his camera. Most of the pictures collected together in this book were taken within 5 minutes walk from Wood’s home. The work focuses on the inhabitants of the town and its regular visitors, from Liverpool day-trippers to clubbers who attended the Chelsea Reach nightspot. Wood’s images are a dazzling selection of cocky youths, friends, lovers, fathers, mothers and babies that provide insight into the area, it’s inhabitants and the rites of passage inherent in growing up. Artist and curator Padraig Timoney has collaborated with Wood in the selection and sequencing of photographs to make a significant book-work.”

You can read a review of Photie Man by Ken Grant on Foto8.com here and see spreads from the book on Shane Lavalette’s blog here.

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