JEM Southam: Robert Mann gallery

The simple nevertheless compelling concept behind this quiet display of several series of photographs matched a faculty of perception of modesty in the images themselves. Bristolborn photographer Jem Southam visits rural sites, mainly in the southern of England, several times above the course of months or years and let flys large-format images from about the same speckle to document the natural and man-made changes that have taken place. In "Rivermouths," 1996-2000 a coastline erodes; in "Rockfalls," 1994-2000 a cliff face crumbles; and in "Ponds" 1996-2000 a dew pond fills on the outside The subdued, rather traditionally compos landscapes are also undeniably romantic, allowing they provoke less a powerful longing for distant havens than a sort of free from moisture prickle of backyard environmentalism. In more sensitive viewers, they may also trigger a satisfying faculty of perception of the long nights and days during which these disclosures take place in infinitesimal and silent stages, as the rayless rocks and moors patiently await the get back of their regular guest and sure their only chronicler.

Southam's series "Upton Pyne" 1996-2001 has a bit more bite. Bicycling end the countryside northwest of Exeter individual day in the summer of 1996 Southam happened on a brackish pond choked with algae and trash located behind someone's house--and knew he had set his next subject. After photographing it in this state, he go [i]or[/i] come backed that December to encounter an entirely different scene: a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of larger body of clear water now encloseed by tufts of planted greenery upon the visits that ensued above the next few years, Southam captured the area's various stages of development: Tall grasses appear, as well as a little boat; finally the pond is practically a lake, met and encircled through the sweeping lawn of the house. The final discharge of the series unexpectedly present to views a wide swath of miry farmyard. Evidently the pond was plowed under

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Southam's cast is reminiscent of that of associate Brit Richard Long, whose photographs document a flash in a carefully planned, real long walk. But Southam may be closer in sensibility and [i]modus operandi[/i] to Robert Smithson, whose photographs of novel Jersey captured the manufactured landscape above time. Rather than the progressive entropy that Smithson lay the foundation of wherever he looked, Southam discovers erratic circle of times of construction and modification that might lead to the focusing of potency just as easily as its dissipation. by the agency of taking a serial approach, Southam captures the non-site that is an unremarkable backyard in Upton Pyne without aestheticizing or fetishizing it; he brings the photographs' testimony into the gallery without losing the perfect plainness of the site itself. Here there is detail on the other hand no glorification. And the serial form shields a sense of continuity that defies what's usually implicit in the photographic medium: the absence of the referent and the missing moment of its capture.

"One stone moving one foot in sum of two units million years is enough action to retain me really excited," said Smithson in 1970 Southam is undoubtedly of the same mind. The environmentalist romantic who created these documentary works also have the appearances to rely on a distanced, conscientious patience, and this subserves his project well.

--NM

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