Study Visit: Jem Southam

I first met Jem Southam, leading British photographer, almost twenty years ago. The occasion was a photography workshop about printing with colour negative film and we were based in a darkroom belonging to The University of Plymouth, right in the centre of Exeter. Jem showed us the basics of colour correction and a small group of us made prints from our own negatives under his direction. I can not exactly remember why I was doing the workshop since I had already started to become involved with digital photography and printing with an inkjet; in those early days of the 1990s however, colour consistency was a difficult process and not even Photoshop had very good colour control. Jem opened up the world of colour photography not as a technical issue rather as a way of seeing.
At that time, Jem Southam had made a body of work called The Red River which was a fascinating study of a river near Exeter that had been published by Cornerhouse; as a student, one was introduced to the fact that one could make a valuable body of landscape work near to one’s home rather than travelling to an exotic location and that this could be a cultural endeavour rather than about possessing camera equipment. At the time Jem was reading a recently released book called “Landscape and Memory” by Simon Schama who later became a well known TV personality and whose book is now read by students of landscape photography.
Southam also became better known. I began encountering his work in galleries, most recently in the Landmark exhibition at Somerset House in 2013. A photograph of a pond titled “Ditching Beacon, Dew Pond” appeared in the Pastoral section of this exhibition. Southam says, “Though I have made work photographing the landscape in England for the past thirty-five years, I now regard myself as ‘a geographical labourer’”, a phrase that was used by the poet Wordsworth in describing a cartographer at work in the landscape. Prior to this exhibition, I had seen more of Southam’s work displayed in an exhibition called Sense of Place; his huge photographs hung from the walls of the gallery, showing the chalk downs of Sussex and the Caux region of Normandy, regions that were once joined and are part of the same rock deposits laid down between 60 and 120 million years ago. The imagery shows the process of gradual erosion brought about by the sea that made this decay possible during the last 80,000 years and still continues as Southam’s photographs reveal.
A number of Southam’s photographic books are available. His most recent is River Winter about a stretch of river near his home in Exeter, an area that he continues to visit. This work was partly inspired by the understanding what a river meant to the children from the street in which he lives. Other books include Rockfalls and Ponds, Painter’s Pool and Landscape Stories

I met Jem Southam again quite recently. The occasion was an exhibition of photogravures at The Thelma Hulton Gallery in Honiton, Devon of Karl Blossfeldt, the German Expressionist who a hundred years ago made a series of black and white close ups of plants for his students; Blossfeldt was a sculptor rather than a photographer. Southam introduced him by placing Blossfeldt in the context of his times, Eugene Atget being a contemporary photographer who also made “documents for artists”.
Jem Southam, now partially retired from the University of Plymouth, School of Art and Media (Faculty of Arts), has agreed to talk to students of the Open College of the Arts at Exeter Central Library on 11 April at 11.30am. Students of all disciplines are invited to attend what promises to be an inspirational event. Jem will also look at work by students.
The event has been arranged to allow for students to come from further afield; those who take the 9 o’clock from Paddington would reach in time.
To book your place email enquiries@oca.ac.uk