Monday 8 October 2012

The Red River by Jem Southam

The Red River by Jem Southam
ISBN 0948797258

This book also uses text and poems  in a collaborative form to bring alive the images. The feeling I get is of a dank, dark, cloudy and overcast environment where everyday there is drizzle and the smell of wet leaves and oozing mud. The images were interesting because the area around the Red River is in sharp contrast to the Cornwall that I know of sunny days and rugged coastline.

The book is themed with seven sections representing interpretations of myths on creation, the primordial forest, industrialisation, post industrial leisure among others.

The way the book was put together like this was intriguing and showed me just how different an approach can be when choosing themes and narratives. The images themselves again loosely following a river like the Alec Soth book and showed us misty scenes with stone houses covered in ivy; an aviary shot close and filling the frame; an underground mining tunnel the muddy redness oozing from the walls and a hole in the ground with a discarded fridge dumped inside. The images were recognisably British and evocative of parts of our landscape.

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