The Avon Gorge

Stand by for another book. Well, I did say there were three (or maybe even four) more currently in the pipeline. This is the next one to pop out. There will be more.

Although we live in Southampton, in 2015 my partner got a job in Bristol, and so had to find accommodation there to ease the burden of commuting. She managed to find a nice, modern flat in a block perched on the top of the Avon Gorge quite near the Downs, and I got into the habit of joining her there. We had previously lived in Bristol in our post-university years from 1977 to 1984, and it was fun to reacquaint myself with the city. It has changed quite a lot in the intervening decades, although the Downs and the Gorge have changed very little, if at all.

Being so near the Gorge, I began taking regular walks along it, either towards Clifton, where Brunel's famous suspension bridge is located, or towards Sea Mills, where the steep-sided gorge opens out into a less dramatic valley, and the road and the railway to the port at Avonmouth are conveyed over the mudflats of the Avon's tributary river Trym on two rather less elegant structures. Naturally, I take photographs as I walk, and have built up a solid series over the past eight years of regular visits, in the vein of that now well-established photographic genre of "repeated visits to the same limited geographical location", which AFAIK has no name: "chorography", perhaps?

I'm wary of photographers who make work in landscapes they do not inhabit as a resident. But no-one really "inhabits" the Avon Gorge. For locals it's primarily a landscape of transition, passed through when commuting into Avonmouth or into the city centre by road or rail, or briefly traversed when driving over the suspension bridge. For others it's a leisure resource: rock climbers learn their ropes on the cliff faces, and on many nights we have watched the flickering lights of mountain-bikers descending down steep tracks through Leigh Woods on the far side of the Gorge from the comfort of our flat. Then there are the peregrine-watchers, who regularly occupy a little rocky platform with their tripods and telescopes, and various other hobbyists, not to mention those in pursuit of various chilly thrills under cover of darkness. But all of these folk, having done whatever they came to do, will go home to somewhere quite different within the city.

Consequently, I feel I am getting to know the area as well as it can be known, and that there is value in my particular take on the visual variety it offers. Being tidal, the Avon rises and falls dramatically twice every day, exposing or covering the mudflats, whose colour depends on the light, the weather conditions, and the direction of view. On a far slower, seasonal timetable, where the sides of the gorge are heavily-wooded the absence, presence, and colour of foliage is in constant flux. By contrast, the human elements in the Gorge change very little, apart from the density of the traffic: what little available space there is has already been fully occupied by road, rail, and other infrastructure of long-standing. The interaction of these elements in their differing periodic cycles is what gives the Gorge its ever-changing visual interest.

I have long been an admirer of the genre established by Hokusai with his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji – followed by such similar collections as Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and Henri Rivière's Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower – so I was initially tempted by the idea of "X views of the Clifton Suspension Bridge". But the bridge is somewhat over-photographed, and as so many of the better photos in my files do not include that particular landmark I settled on a less specific "X Views of the Avon Gorge". The final value of "X" as yet remains to be determined: even now, each walk still seems to add something new.

But sometimes a line needs to be drawn under an ongoing project, however provisional, so that it does not become one of those never-ending accumulations of unexamined material that ends up too overwhelming and too various ever to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. So this book – actually a 56 page "magazine" (a format I have come to prefer) – represents the drawing of such a line, and is now available at £15.25, with the usual downloadable PDF version at £5.99. Clicking on the cover image below will link you to a full preview on my Blurb bookstore; have a look and see what you think. In this shop browsers are under no obligation to buy!

The Avon Gorge

Talking of periodic cycles, it seems I have recently returned to straight photography as my main medium (which will come as welcome news to some of you, I know). This is almost entirely due to the iPhone. A while ago I bought a Panasonic GM1 on eBay, which is the smallest micro 4/3 camera ever made (and it really is hilariously tiny) together with its dinky little collapsible 12-32mm lens, and even that feels on the bulky side by comparison. There's really no arguing with the convenience of a phone now that the results are good enough to make you think twice about carrying even a doll's-house-sized camera. In fact, several of the pictures in the Avon Gorge publication are iPhone pictures, and I doubt anyone but me could say which they are, even as medium-sized prints.