Cast a cool eye on life, on work
Mary Keen
A CORNER OF ENGLAND by James Ravilious Devon Books, Halsgmve House, Tiverton Business Park, Tiverton, Devon, EX16 6SS, £19.95, pp. 160 James Ravilious' photographs of North Devon landscapes are in the English lyric tradition. Son of Eric Ravilious, he gives us pictures that have all the poignancy of the commonplace found in his father's work. Those who respond to Bewick, Palmer and Nash or who have looked in vain for the vanished England depicted in a Griggs drawing or a Betjeman film should find what they seek in these pages.
A Corner of England is a collection of photographs taken over a period of 17 years. The canvas was a scrap of country covering the 20-mile span of the valleys of the Taw and Torridge, where Ravilious recorded a way of life that has hardly changed for hundreds of years. Most of the pictures commissioned were to form part of the Beaford archive, to complement a collection of older photographs. The best are black and white. Early morning mist on the River Taw, Five Barrows under snow, orchards, the shadows of tombstones, wood-ricks, all have a brooding, almost spooky quality.
But if the landscapes seem to contain more than meets the eye, the pictures of the people who live and work the land are different. These are direct and revealing. They tell us everything about life in the country in all weathers: the farmer's breakfast table, the milk round dispensed from the back of a Morris Traveller, children on their way to school, old men collecting their pensions, young men gazing at motor-bikes. Everyone is recorded with the same observant and unsentimental eye. The coloured rainbows over corn stooks that adorn the cover and the quote on the back of the book, which describes the contents as 'a warmhearted portrait of country life', hardly do justice to this poetic work.
In the English lyric tradition: Red Devon cow, Narracott, near Hollocombe
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