Photography/memoir
The Recent Past James Ravilious (Wilmington Square Books, £30) James Ravilious Robin Ravilious (Wilmington Square Books, £16.99)
James ravilious’s photographs of rural north devon in the 1970s and 1980s capture a way of life that was vanishing then and is now almost gone. To the contemporary eye, it seems incredible that this tough, primitive existence espousing ageold farming practices passed down from father to son could have survived into the age of margaret Thatcher and the mobile phone. Yet, in one beautiful, isolated corner of england, it did and this touching, surprising collection of photographs brings that world to life.
For 17 years between 1973 and 1991, James ravilious roamed the lanes, fields and villages recording the revolving seasons, the rhythms of the farming year, village life and, above all, the people. If some of the photographs evoke a vanished rural idyll, many others remind us that life for the smallholders was grindingly hard. likewise, if the collection seems to glory in the old ways at the expense of acknowledging progress and modernity, it is because the work was commissioned by a local arts centre to create a historical record.
In this aim, ravilious succeeded triumphantly. The historical value of the archive is self-evident, but its charm lies in the emotional connection ravilious had with the landscape and the people who lived and worked in it.
By becoming rooted in the place itself over such a long period, he was able to record life there as it was, unposed and unselfconscious, capturing its sense of community, its humour, its hardships and eccentricities. The best photographs are those of the farmers themselves, grizzled survivors of an older world clinging on in the hills and valleys of north devon.
ravilious was a self-taught photographer, but artistic blood ran in his veins. His father, eric, was a well-known painter of the 1920s and 1930s, whose spare, modernist landscapes are so characteristic of British painting of the inter-world War period. This is but a tiny selection of James’s 75,000 photographs of north devon, but it makes a glowing record of rural life in that place at that time.
The companion volume to the collection of photographs is a biography of James by his widow, robin. It’s a moving book, lyrically written, a portrait of an artist and a marriage, but also a meditation on the creative impulse and the artistic temperament. anyone who wants to know what lay behind ravilious’s extraordinary photographs should pick up a copy. Richard Hopton