John Davies’ “The British Landscape”
Open Democracy reviews John Davies’ new book “The British Landscape” with some example photos which have an unmistakable Ballardian feel.
“…Davies focuses on the industrial occupation of the landscape ‚Äì particularly around Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield and south Wales ‚Äì in the last days of British industrial muscle-power. These portray a period of decline, regeneration, and in some cases the complete levelling of the former factories and houses, followed by a process of landscaping to produce an effect as if nothing had ever existed before.
This complete eradication of all evidence of human industry, culture and community, produces 
some of the most disturbing images, as Davies’ photographs raise the complex issue of how we preserve the public memory and experience of our industrial past, while adapting to new ways of living and inhabiting the landscape. Too many regeneration schemes, these photographs suggest, are based on the wholesale eradication of public history and memory, producing an ersatz sense of modernity, a mixture of system-built housing, ring roads, theme pubs and retail parks.
The photograph of Agecroft Power Station, near Salford, taken in 1983, portrays what is actually typical about most industrial landscapes ‚Äì that they are not urban at all, but usually comprise heavy industry set in a rural hinterland. For this reason it is not surprising that many miners who turned to writing and painting ‚Äì and quite a few did ‚Äì were committed pastoralists.” MORE
John Davies’ site is here.
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