NEW HAVEN, CT.- This fall, the Yale Center for British will present an exhibition of large-format photographs by Jem Southam, one of the most significant photographers working in Britain today. Southam creates photographic narratives of landscape transformed by time and human kind. Twenty-one prints from Southam’s Upton Pyne series chronicle six years in the life of an unprepossessing pond near the photographer’s home in Exeter, Devon. From 1996 to 2001, Southam returned regularly to the site, recording the changing seasons and tenants’ attempts to make improvements to the landscape. Shown in the context of the British traditions of landscape representation, in which the Center’s collections are so rich, Southam’s photographs ask viewers to reexamine notions of meaning and beauty in the landscape.

Southam, born in Bristol, England, in 1950, is Reader in Photography at the University of Plymouth. Collections of his photographs taken over the last thirty years include The Red River (1989), The Raft of Carrots (1992), and The Shape of Time (2000). In 2005 he published Landscape Stories, the fi rst comprehensive collection of his work. Another series of photographs centered on a pond, very different in character from Upton Pyne, appeared in 2006 under the title The Painter’s Pool.

Organized in association with the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Jem Southam: Upton Pyne is curated by Scott Wilcox, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art.