Born in Bristol in 1950, Jem Southam is one of the UK's most renowned landscape photographers, working predominately in the South West of England where he lives.
Jem’s richly detailed works document subtle changes and transitions within the landscape, allowing him to explore cycles of life and death, decay and renewal, through spring and winter, and also to reveal the subtlest of human interventions in the natural landscape. His work is characterised by its balance of poetry and lyricism within a documentary practice and combines topographical observation with other references: personal, cultural, political, scientific, literary and psychological. Jem's working method combines the predetermined and the intuitive. Seen together, his series suggest the forging of pathways towards visual and intellectual resolution.
Jem has had solo exhibitions at The Photographers Gallery, London, Tate St Ives, Cornwall and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London and his work is held in many important collections, both in the UK and internationally.
Until his retirement from teaching three years ago, Jem was Professor of Photography at the University of Plymouth and he is represented by the Huxley Parlour Gallery in London.
On episode 174, Jem discusses, among other things:
- His student experience.
- Changes to the photographic culture.
- The importance of negative film.
- The gallery he ran in Bristol with friend Adrian Lovelace.
- Myths and stories.
- Bodies of water and Winter.
- What is a river?
- The influence of land art.
- The Pond at Upton Pyne.
- His switch to digital and how a broken elbow contributed to it.
Referenced:
- Martin Parr
- Paul Strand
- Bill Brandt
- Paul Graham
- Tony Ray Jones
- The Bechers
- Robert Adams
- Susan Butler
- Adrian Lovelace
- Bruegel
- Richard Hamlyn
- Barbara Bosworth
- Josef Sudek
- Sigma DP2
“I made a still life picture of an apple when I was a student, with a plate camera. I still remember now that I stood back took the cloth off the top of my head and I said ‘this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life’... This apple stood in for the colour of the English landscape. It was a sort of metaphorical kind of emblem.”
— Jem Southam