Jem Southam Landscape Photographer

Jem Southam -  Landscape photography

Jem Southam, born in Bristol in 1950, is one of the UK's leading photographers. He is renowned for his series of colour landscape photographs, beginning in the 1970s and continuing until the present. His trademark is the patient observation of changes at a single location over many months or years.

Southam's subjects are predominately situated in the South West of England where he lives and works. He observes the balance between nature and man's intervention and traces cycles of decay and renewal. His work combines topographical observation with other references: personal, cultural, political, scientific, literary and psychological. Southam's working method combines the predetermined and the intuitive. Seen together, his series suggest the forging of pathways towards visual and intellectual resolution.

The following are a series of his work

The Pond at Upton Pyne January 1997

Pond in January 1999

Pond in February 2001

Pond December 2001

Southam uses a large format camera to produce 8 x 10 inch (20.5 x 25.5 cm) negatives that record a high level of detail. C-type prints are made from these. When the pictures are enlarged from the negatives, under supervision at a commercial lab, they reveal an entrancing wealth of information. Others are 'contact printed' (placing the negative directly onto the photographic paper) by Southam himself, deliberately to achieve a contrasting intensity and intimacy.

Jem Southam

Jem studied photography at the London College of Printing and subsequently worked as a photographer and designer at the Arnolfini, Bristol before beginning his teaching career at Falmouth School of Art in 1982. His photographic works are made at sites close to where he lives and involve many years of walking and revisiting the same locations over and over again. As the works progress he builds narrative sequences of pictures and texts which are presented in books and exhibitions.
His books include:
The Floating Harbour : A landscape history of Bristol City Docks
1982 Redcliff Press
The Red River
1989 Cornerhouse
The Raft of Carrots
1992 The Photographers Gallery
Rockfalls, Rivermouths and Ponds
2000 Photoworks/Towner
Landscape Stories
2005 Princeton Architectural Press
The Painter’s Pool
2007 Nazraeli Press​