Jem Southam Talk at Towner Gallery
Posted on: Sun March 11, 2012
I was lucky enough to go along to the Towner yesterday (Saturday 10th March 2012) to see a talk by British landscape photographer, Jem Southam. I’ve been a fan of his work for a while now so when I had the email come through from the Towner I booked up straight away and I’m glad I did as it was the best 4 quid I have spent in a long time!
It was a bad start, for me anyway, as I have a cold and as soon as Jem started to talk I had a coughing fit and had to leave the room! I managed to return quickly with a glass of water and luckily that kept me quiet for most of the talk – phew!
Jem spoke about how he started in photography and walked us through many of his well loved photographic projects, such as Red River, The Shape of Time: Ponds, River Mouths & Rocks Falls and Upton Pyne. At the end gave us a sneak preview in to some brand new un-published work he is dong on the River Exe. Beautiful is not the word, absolutely stunning and well worth the money just to see the half a dozen or so images.
There were a few things that struck me about his practice and one of them was just how slowly he works. I knew he used a large format 10×8 camera and there is no fast working with a camera like that. But I was interested to know just how few photographs he does take, it seems that the Upton Pyne series he would visit maybe 10 times in a year and as far as I can gather, just take a photo or two per visit. He said that he usually has about 6-10 projects/locations on the go at any one time but could leave one of those even for a period of a few years and then return to continue work.
I asked him how important it was to have a good name for a project, he looked at me for a couple of seconds and answered, ‘very important’. Project names had come up during the talk and it was a question I wanted to ask anyway after a friend had mentioned that Alec Soth recently accused Southam of, ‘poor and lazy naming of projects’. It was something I couldn’t verify online so decided not to bring that up. If it is true it’s perhaps a little rich coming from the photographer who did a project on Niagara, called, err… Niagara. Anyway, I wasn’t so bothered about that but more how important he thought it was and how he does it. He spoke briefly about finding a small raft of carrots on the water once and hence the title of his 1992 book ‘The Raft of Carrots’. He said that he usually has to start work on a project before the name will come and that it’s often quite difficult to do it after the project has finished.
Also interesting was just how he finds his projects or as he says, how they find him. Quite often he just stumbles upon places and forms a connection with them and a project evolves from that. He mentioned about photographing close to home too and how he has been working on a project for about 15 years just photographing his garden through his kitchen window. Other projects too have been right on his doorstep and that re-ignited an idea of mine to photograph the housing estate on which I live, just walking a few minutes from my front door. The above images were taken yesterday and perhaps will start a little project.
Another excellent event at Towner and I look forward to many more.