But they also form a treasure- trove for viewers of any age who are curious about the human condition, and its involvement with the land.’An English Eye’ by James Ravilious & Peter Hamilton (Devon Books, pounds 20): out now.. His work is so distinctive that it deserves to be taken out of the orbit of local history. It is dignity of an unfashionable form – the dignity of labour.Ravilious’s new book, An English Eye was published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name, launched at the Royal Photographic Society in Bath and now on tour. Even humorous subjects such as Alf Pugsley returning a lamb to its mother, which catches the shepherd in his homemade plastic mackintosh, or Bill Swale proudly guarding his “prize-winning onions”, or Archie Parkhouse and Ivor Brock moving a sick ram (which they do by dragging the perplexed creature along in an old tin bath) have unusual dignity. There are close-ups of picnic teas, pigs slumbering beside a woodpile, and rabbits gazing at a pigeon. He also owes a considerable – and acknowledged – debt to Edward Smith, the vastly under-rated British “humanitarian” photographer.
Like Cartier- Bresson, with his celebrated resistance to any cropping or cutting of his images, Ravilious’s geometrically balanced pictures all show the black edging that marks their full circumference.Ravilious cites Cartier-Bresson’s 1969 exhibition at the V&A as his earliest photographic inspiration. He loves his old Leica, and his ideal worlds are given boundaries by a cherished Leitz framer. Not for him the niceties of laser prints and digital manipulation. Even colour printing is taken as over-reminiscent of what painters do, as well as being beyond his control in its processing. One portrait has him deep in a forest, buried under one of those black cloths favoured by Victorian street photographers. That of the hedger drinking from his enamel mug on a lunchbreak, every detail salient into the farthest distance, every cut twig sharply outlined, is reminiscent of the Samuel Palmer woodcuts now stacked around Ravilious’s living room. What is most specific is often what is also most timeless.Yet his chosen medium is one repeatedly deemed the most modern available to any artist.
If photography was chosen primarily in reaction to other art-forms, then Ravilious’s use of it looks back rather than forward. Since then he has carefully compiled an archive of pastoral photography which now numbers more than 80,000 images. They may seem ordinary, but to Ravilious “there is emphatically no such thing as the ordinary” The extraordinary in the everyday is his subject. The portrait, Archie Parkhouse with ivy for sheep, has at once the sense of a hard-living, pipe-smoking farmer in 1975 and of a fairytale woodman, swathed in ivy down to around his waist. Geese at Swimbridge (right) presents a gaggle of birds that seem to have waddled under that cloudy sky for centuries.
In capturing his own corner of the extraordinary, Ravilious also taps the particular.
