Arts / Documentary photography
Bristol’s Floating Harbour over the years
Head down to the Bristol Photo Festival to learn about Bristol’s Floating Harbour from the late 1970s.
Jem Southam’s exhibition, ‘The Floating Harbour: A Landscape History of the Bristol City Docks’, is a series of photographs of Bristol Harbour that follows the rapidly changing history of the docks.
After his grandfather, Harry Cottrell, spent his working life in the Bristol docks as a shipping clerk, overseeing the arrival, unloading and distribution of guano, Jem was keen to further explore what the Floating Harbour meant to his family and the community.
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‘One day, looking out the window of our office I watched as a large shed was torn down across the other side of the quay. I went over during the lunchbreak with my camera and took some pictures, and as I was doing so realised that the whole of the dockland was going to shortly experience a similar fate,” said Jem.
“Here was a project waiting for me, and for the next 4/5 years I photographed across the whole of the Floating Harbour.”
Southam photographed sites including Bathhurst Basin, Welsh Back, Cumberland Basin, and Narrow Quay alongside sets of pictures of specific types of dockland furniture – the cranes, the pumphouses, the bridges.
Studies were made of individual buildings and their setting, and then further pictures were made of these buildings into the wider landscape. The pictures were all made in black and white using an old-fashioned plate camera and over the course of the project, approximately 1000 negatives were exposed.
Credit: Jem Southam.
Jem added: “It was always the plan to show some of the pictures in Bristol, well after many people’s memories of what they once were had faded, and it is a great pleasure to be participating with the Bristol photography Festival in displaying some pictures outside in the docks themselves.”
Jem Southam’s exhibition is on at the Bristol Photo Festival until Autumn 2021. You can find more information and book tickets here.
Main photo: Jem Southam
Read more: Bristol Photo Festival 2021 – Island Life: A portrait of Britain
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