During lockdown I have started collecting photography books, particularly those that echo my current project exploring landscape, identity and history. My own project, Nothing Has Changed; Everything Has Changed, traces England’s border at the time we are leaving Europe. I am interested in other photographers who have explored our coast and inland borders, but also in photographers who explore either a specific geographic area or the concept of national identity.
Thames Log, Chloe Dewe Mathews
The first thing that strikes you about this book is how it feels. This is a pliable, softcover book where each page is folded into the next (the pages are unopened). Photos bleed around each crease drawing you through the book. You feel like a cork being swept downstream as you give in to the urge to continue the unfinished story each page presents. The book documents rituals along the Thames from swan upping to ship spotting, river blessing to mudlarking.
Thames Log, Chloe Dewe Mathews
We English, Simon Roberts
“We English surveys the diverse pastimes of ordinary people in the context of the English landscape” - Roberts took his 5x4 camera on tour in 2007 and 2008, crowdsourcing ideas for activities to photograph. We observe the participants from a distance; they are unaware, or don’t care, that they are being photographed. Martin Parr deemed this book one of the thirty most influential books of the early 2000’s.
The Shipping Forecast, Mark Power
The shipping forecast became background noise to our formative years; reassuring, constant, enigmatic. We pictured storm-force winds in North Utsire, imagined a severe gale in German Bight and wondered exactly what “good becoming moderate or poor” would look like in South-East Iceland. Power has done what many of us thought we might one day do; visited each destination to see what’s there.
The Shipping Forecast, Mark Power
Shore, Niall McDiarmid
A slim book with captivating landscapes, portraits and vignettes from the Essex coast. Looking through this book curiosity is ignited, judgments are made made and re-formed, and childhoods are nostalgically remembered.
How We Are, Val Williams & Susan Bright
How We Are, Photographing Britain From the 1840s to The Present was an exhibition at the Tate in 2007, curated by Williams and Bright and telling the story of the role photography has played in British visual culture. Critically it included photographers previously neglected when recounting our shared history; women and ethnic minority photographers. The book accompanying the exhibition is still available.
