On The Bookshelf

Jem Southam The Harbour

Reviewed by Nick Hodgson FRPS

All Images ©Jem Southam

The Harbour by Jem Southam is published by RRB Books

www.rrbphotobooks.com/products/jem-southam-the-harbour

Chance so often plays an important role for the documentary photographer as an idea for a project unfolds. And so it was one day in 1978, when a young Jem Southam working at the renowned Arnolfini gallery in Bristol peered out of his office window to see what all the noise was about. The cacophony opposite was the demolition of an old quayside warehouse, so he quickly went over to the site with camera in hand to investigate further. As Southam writes in the foreword to his new book The Harbour, ‘So began a photographic study of the remains of the architectural landscape of the docks’.

Today Bristol is both a thriving regional city and arguably a key hub for the British photography scene, boasting the headquarters of the RPS and Martin Parr Foundation together with photo-friendly institutions such as the Royal West of England Academy, UWE and the aforementioned Arnolfini. But back in the late 70’s, Bristol was, like many British cities, searching for a new economic identity. Its traditional industries, including tobacco, wine importing and aerospace were all, for very different reasons, under threat. Financial services, and Wallace and Gromit, had yet to arrive. Central Bristol, dominated by its dockland area, was an area waiting to be transformed. Centuries-old industries such as shipbuilding had virtually ceased and there was little activity apart from visits by a sand dredger. All other commercial ships were too large to navigate up the River Avon, so they offloaded their cargoes at the then recently-built Royal Portbury Dock on the Severn. The central Bristol dockland area of the ‘Floating Harbour’ - so called because it was originally the tidal river until the city fathers realised the importance of building lock gates at each end of the docks to retain a constant water level, thereby creating a separate tidal waterway called the ‘New Cut’ - was a scene of empty, decaying warehouses and old cranes. Apart from the fledgling museum of Brunel’s ship Great Britain, few people bothered to visit the area. Apart from Southam.

Often working on a Sunday morning, he would walk around the derelict dockland sites pretty much unimpeded, tripod and 5x4 MPP folding bed camera in hand, and set about recording the vistas. In the fiveyear period of the project he shot over 1,000 images. The results portray at times melancholic scenes of yesteryear, of abandonment and former industrial glory, of erstwhile sites of employment and pride (the harbour was home to the phrase ‘ship-shape and Bristol fashion’), but with no indication of the transformation the area was later to experience.

The Harbour is a beautiful hardcover landscape first edition of 104 pages with 58 monochrome plates. The edit is sequenced geographically, starting at the western end of the docks and heading east. The pacing is deliberately slow, as these images require full examination. We see old gas works, bonded warehouses, derelict dock offices and old crane piers set against an empty sky looking somewhat lost. Abandoned warehouses are juxtaposed against the distant Georgian terraces of Clifton. Traces of old railway lines, boat moorings and collapsed roofs abound. Look at many of the backgrounds and the compositional depth is remarkable - Bristol’s famous landmarks can often be seen in the distance.

The book’s cover might on first examination appear abstract but is in fact an outlined map of the Floating Harbour and New Cut, with the rear outside image (Sand Wharf, Hotwells 1978) featuring the Harry Brown sand dredger being unloaded - poignant as this was the last commercially-working ship in Bristol docks and the picture is one of only a handful of images in the book depicting ongoing human activity.

Southam first exhibited these early images at the now-defunct Bristol Arts Centre in 1981 and a book featuring rather more text than images was published in 1983. In 2021, as part of the Bristol Photography Festival, a selection of his prints were shown outside The Underfall Yard at the western end of the docks. RRB’s decision to produce the book now, especially as the majority of the photographs are previously unpublished, is a logical final step along the journey of Southam’s project.

I grew up in 1970’s Bristol and my great-grandfather worked at the docks there as a shipbuilder, so I’ve enjoyed both the personal nostalgia of The Harbour and its historical documentary qualities. But The Harbour is more than just a fascinating delve into the past for Bristolians of a certain age and as such should undoubtedly have a much wider appeal. It’s an important body of British industrial documentary landscapes, of an area about to go through significant and lasting change, created by one of Britain’s most respected contemporary documentary photographers.