Customer Reviews

The British Landscape

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If you buy this stunning book you'll have to consider (only for a few seconds though) where you'll keep it because the photos are 14.5 inches wide by 10 deep which is an impressive size for an admittedly large subject and printed in 200dpi helps.

The editorial format is quite interesting with the first five landscapes, as you would expect, looking down on the Scottish and English countryside but by photo six John Davies concentrates on man-made Britain and in particular the industrial Midlands and North. Fortunately nearly all the photos are taken from a higher vantage point, which gives plenty of scope to show masses of detail layered off to the horizon.

These photos are definitely not the conventional landscape Britain but the gritty city, energy producing and manufacturing part of the Nation. The front cover shot of the Salford power station cooling towers sum up Davies' style because as well as the four huge structures there is a football match in progress in the foreground. Nicely many of the photos show people in the landscape, working, walking, talking or just kids playing.

This book is a remarkable landscape view of contemporary Britain made all the more powerful because of the large image size. Another reason I like the book is because all the photos have detailed captions with plenty of historical detail. So many photobooks these days seem reluctant to give the viewer any information other than a picture on a page.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

John Davies deserves to be better known in the United States. Using a large format camera with impeccable skill, he works in a "topographic" tradition that is closer to Fenton and the Frith Studios than to the "new topographic" work of photographers like Lewis Baltz or Steven Shore. Perhaps the closest comparison in recent work is the Becher's "Industrial Landscapes", which is atypical for them.

I offer these comparisons only to encourage you to look at this book: John Davies' work is self-sufficient. His photographs are stunning for their detail and their complex compositions, but there is nothing affected about them. Davies seems to choose the lighting and viewpoint that best describe what he wants to photograph and for the most part that is the post-industrial urban landscape. He shows us the layers of development and redevelopment, the patterns that grow around factories and churches, the sinews of roads and railways that run through it all. There is nothing aloof or artful about these photographs. This is a human landscape, represented by a humanist. I highly recommend this book.