Art / Photography
Jem Southam’s historic photos of Bristol harbour on show at Society Cafe
Photographer Jem Southam is renowned for capturing the slow and subtle changes in rural landscapes over long periods of time, as exampled in his collection A Bend in the River, which featured as part of the RWA’s season of photography in the first half of 2023.
However, his latest series to be exhibited in Bristol is focused upon the wholly more urban and industrial setting of Bristol Harbourside in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period of significant loss, change and regeneration for the city.
Some of the images (from an archive of around 900) featured in Bristol Photo Festival 2021, and they are now brought together with numerous others for a new RRB photobook, titled The Harbour.
is needed now More than ever
Image taken looking towards the Suspension Bridge, from July 1978 – photo: Jem Southam
“After centuries during which the harbour was a central hub of the commerce of the city and a great generator of weath, through fair and foul means, they had largely fallen silent,” state the explanatory notes to the book.
“The end of that working life in the late sixties to the mid-seventies, left the sculptural presence of The Floating Harbour, surrounded by the disused and decaying dockland fabric: the cranes, the bridges, the pump-houses, the warehouses and in particular the giant bonded warehouses, the offices, the railways, the terraces of houses, the ship-building yards with their dry docks, the sand yards.
Image taken in February 1978 – photo: Jem Southam
“In The Harbour Southam documents the disused and neglected infrastrcuture, a brief period of calm after those centuries of activity, before the redevelopment really got going.
“It is an archival record of the architectural landscape rather than meditation on loss. The industrial life of the docks, and all the human stories it impacted, preserved in record but not mourned.”
Untitled IV – photo: Jem Southam
For the rest of 2023, the photos can be viewed at Society Café, itself positioned on the city’s harbour, and prints of some of them are available to buy – with proceeds going to help clean and scan Southam’s archive, which, it is hoped, will be housed publicly in the future.
Jem Southam’s exhibition of photographs of Bristol Harbour in the 1970s will be at Society Cafe, Narrow Quay until December. Jem Southam: The Harbour is available now from RRB Photobooks.
Main photo: Jem Southam
Read more: Bristol’s Floating Harbour over the years
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