“In the middle of a December night a few years ago, I was woken up by the phone ringing downstairs. Nothing good ever comes out of a call like that and this time it was the news that my little brother had been admitted to the hospital, and the attending doctor had called to say that he thought it unlikely that he would survive the night. I drove to see him and sat with him through the wee hours of the morning, in the eerie silence of the ER, until late in the morning, when it seemed he would recover." “When I got home that afternoon I decided to go for a walk by the river. As the darkness of twilight gradually gathered, I sat on a log to analyze the thoughts and emotions of the day. Gradually I became absorbed in what was in front of me; the turbulence of the surface of the streams as the water rushed around the bend, the waving of the reeds and the branches of the overhanging tree, and the pink of the clouds pushed across the sky by a southwesterly breeze. When the mallard ducks came up from the bank to swim across the river in search of a safe haven for the night, I grabbed the little digital camera I had just started using and quickly snapped a picture.” “In the middle of another night, a couple of years after the first call, the phone rang again, with the same message. I went to the hospital one more time to sit next to Andy, however, this time he was unable to communicate. As I write this on the cusp of the vernal equinox in 2021, I have just come to the end of another riverside season: the fifth winter. It's hard to stop, such are the profound pleasures of witnessing and sharing tranquility. wonders of a winter morning, at a bend in the river.”- Jem Southam Over the past four winters, the English artist Jem Southam has repeatedly visited a short stretch of riverbank along the floodplain of the River Exe. He stands and watches, as twilight fades into darkness or as the light of dawn gathers, witnessing the different passing of each winter. In the evenings, long after sunset, swans, geese and ducks arrive at the river to spend the night safely. In the mornings, the birds wake up, preen, feed and socialize as they prepare for the new day. These periods of subtle drama have played out continuously for millennia, as the world turns and each new day dawns, the spectacle repeats itself. Yet it is endlessly varied, and in the photographs in this book, Jem Southam annotates and narrates the subtle changes and dramas of the theatrical space around him.
Pages — 124
Hardcover / Serigraphy
Size — 300x230mm
English
