Output details

The River Winter

The research comprises a body of forty photographs made along sections of the River Exe in Devon. The work is a sequential study of the passage of a single winter 2010/2011, moving from late autumn through to the first signs of spring.

It is a part of a more extended study, begun in 2008, which sets out to answer the question ‘What is a river?’. The work proposes that the way to answer this question (and other such questions) is through the act of creating, or formulating, an answer – in this case through the act of photographing a river.

Through the months involved in the making of the work eleven sites were identified and photographed over the winter. The pictures revisit some of the sites, while others are seen only once. As such this work continues to develop a fluid and flexible working methodology established in Southam’s practice. In each new work or study this methodology is tested by the new question and by the particularities of the sites and the contingencies of life and practice.

The photographs are made using a 10”x8” plate camera. The descriptive and narrative potential of the large format still photograph are explored. Every feature or object in the photograph is rendered in equal measure across the picture plane, from the smallest plant in the foreground to details on the horizon. The pictures continue a life-times preoccupation with the potential of colour in photography, in particular the specific nuances of the English landscape and it’s weather.

The work is presented with an essay commissioned from Richard Hamblyn, which explores how the cultural phenomena of ‘Winter’ has been established in the imagination of north-west Europeans. So the book places a single winter against the 14.000 that have unravelled since the last great ice-age.