Merrie Albion
With his images of everyday life in the UK taken on large-format field cameras, Simon Roberts is not to everyone’s taste. While his approach can add an almost epic gravitas to everyday scenes in British society, I’ve heard otherwise open-minded nonbelievers mutter ‘I could have taken that on my phone’ as they shake their head and walk away. While some compare him to Martin Parr, Roberts sees his work as following in the tradition of Joel Sternfeld, who explored America’s cultural landscape in the 1970s via extended road trips.
Merrie Albion curates photos from the last decade, and focuses on events and places that define recent British history. These range from the hugely newsworthy, such as general elections or the Grenfell Tower tragedy, to the more parochial and banal. Flicking through this handsomely produced volume, several unifying themes start to emerge. First, Roberts reminds us just how in thrall this country is to its past, a theme explored more fully in his project on the National Trust. Choosing to call the collection ‘Merrie Albion’ further underscores this. Second, Roberts nicely captures the diversity of modern Britain, in a very matter- of-fact way. Whichever community Roberts is shooting, he is a master of capturing crowds, and the comparisons with Bruegel are entirely apt. Third, the Roberts approach is very much about being there, but also distanced – his unwieldy large-format camera puts space between him and his subjects, so he is not an in-your-face documentary or news photographer. His image of the crash at the Shoreham Air Show in 2015 (bottom left) is a classic example of this; the fireball in the mid- ground is just one tragically incongruous element in an otherwise peaceful image of a great British day out.
This is not to say that Roberts’s approach is dry and academic, and a strong affinity with his less-fortunate subjects shines through in this collection. As he says, ‘It’s about capturing the social landscape.’ I find his work very satisfying, so do check out Merrie Albion – even sceptics will find it opens their eyes to new documentary photography approaches.
★★★★ ★ Geoff Harris