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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“The big art institutions here are finally catching up with their American counterparts, with a new photography gallery at the V&A, increased prominence at the Tate and exciting plans elsewhere. We asked four leading curators about the state of the art” writes Sean O’Hagan in today’s Observer. Read full article here.

He also selects my We English exhibition at Flowers East in his ‘Pick of London’s Current Photography Shows’ describing the photographs as “epic vistas captured from a distance that are both timeless and contemporary.”

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“Titled We English, this extensive survey was informed by the likes of Tony Ray-Jones (1941-1972), Martin Parr, Tom Woods, Bill Brandt (1904-1983), and Sylvester Jacobs, amongst others, all of whom had produced insightful and seminal documents recording the English people at various periods over the last half-century. But whilst many of these  photographers approached their subject in what would would be considered a documentary nature, the work of Roberts’, like that of John Davies, reverberate with the  echoes of traditional English landscape painting, whilst remaining stoically contemporary in nature.”

Read the rest of Wayne Ford’s blog post about We English here.

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I’m delighted to announce that Flowers gallery in London will be exhibiting We English in their Flowers East space from 14 October – 19 November 2011. More information here.

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PhotoIreland Festival has just announced Martin Parr’s selection of the 30 most influential photobooks of the last decade, which includes my monograph, We English. The full selection of books are now on show at the National Photographic Archive of Ireland until 14th August 2011 (extended from 31st July).

PhotoIreland Festival have published a catalogue, which includes Martin Parr’s comments on each book, together with illustrations and ‘Author’s notes’. These are mostly unpublished texts by the photographers, publishers and curators of the works – personal statements on the process and raison d’être of each book. The catalogue is available for purchase online here.

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We English is featured in the July Edition of Photo+, the Korean photography magazine.

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Art historian and broadcaster Dan Cruickshank, reviews two new books on England with competing view of the state of the nation in this week’s New Statesman:

Visions of England by Sir Roy Strong.

Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair.

Of Strong’s confession to being “baffled” by the charge that English nationalism is often chauvinistic, Cruickshank writes: “He has no business being baffled about the way English patriots are perceived.” Sinclair’s “view of England and immigration,” Cruickshank goes on, “is a corrective to Strong’s assertion that a rural idyll ‘offers an answer to the present crisis of English identity'”.

You can read an interview with Iain Sinclair about Ghost Milk here.

You can read a review of Roy Strong’s book in the Guardian here.

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Here are some installation shots from a few of the recent exhibitions of We English:

mac, Birmingham, 2011

Ex3 Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Florence, 2010:

National Media Museum, Bradford, 2010:

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