Ravilious on Ravilious

Ian Wright ARPS

In 1972, James Ravilious, having moved from London and settled in North Devon where his wife had a small cottage, was commissioned to photograph the farming community and landscape by an imaginative and farsighted director of the Beaford Arts Centre, John Lane, who had become convinced that this area of North Devon was a very special place in a time of important transition. The archive built up over the next seventeen and a half years is now recognised as one of the finest, and most important social documentary collections to be produced in Britain, and James’s reputation has continued to grow since his untimely death in 1999.

James lavished time and energy on the project, without thought of financial return, and it’s all the more astonishing because it was produced, often with lukewarm support from those who had succeeded John Lane, while James’s pay was never more than that of a local shop assistant.

James’s wife, Robin, was a significant collaborator. As an amateur local historian, she helped her husband to gain an informed understanding of his subject matter, and wrote the most beautiful and evocative text to describe the landscape, its people and James’s philosophy and working practices. As James described her, she was a ‘personal assistant, ruthless critic, and resourceful finder of lost documents’.

Robin’s biography, ‘James Ravilious: A Life’ (Wilmington Square Books, 2017) is a wonderful accompaniment to his images. The earliest book was ‘The Heart of the Country’ (1980), with text by Robin. In 1995, ‘A Corner of England’ was published, followed in 1998 by ‘An English Eye’ which included an excellent introduction by Peter Hamilton, and the large format, ‘The Recent Past’, with an introduction by Robin.

I briefly met James, in 1997, when the touring retrospective exhibition sponsored by the RPS came to Exeter. Then, in 2005, I met Robin when I bought four darkroom prints made from Ravilious negatives. In 2015, she joined one of my small expeditions to India and her storytelling charmed us all. I was delighted when she accepted my invitation to choose twelve of James’s images, with personal commentary.

With Robin’s permission, I’ve combined extracts from her writings that eloquently describe the ‘how and why’ context in which James photographed. They represent an ideal ‘case study’ for amateur photographers who aspire to produce documentary work. Documentary seems only to be a minor interest in the camera club world, and images identified as documentary that I see there, are commonly, in Susan Sontag’s phrase, ‘strong on evidence, weak on meaning.’ For documentary work, being descriptive is essential, but is not sufficient - documentary photography is fundamentally analytical.

Ravilious was photographing the underlying dynamics of a rural society in the throes of rapid change – traditional features of life, and the characters embodying them, were disappearing. By his own account, James was not, ‘a reader’; he admitted to being a lazy researcher. My own view is that Robin made a significant contribution in adding the layer of analysis, of underlying purpose, that helps give the photography so much strength. A selection from Robin’s text follows.

‘[He] had a trained artistic eye with a wealth of historic art in his head, and the ability to spot a composition in the heat of the moment. The rural life he saw going on in the fields and villages around us triggered connections with many of his heroes, such as the medieval illuminators, Constable, the engraver Thomas Bewick and the painter and etcher Samuel Palmer; their works often inspired his choice of shot.

Also, he had a gift for making friends with strangers almost instantly. It came naturally to him to plunge straight into a conversation without conventional introductions. Some may have thought him eccentric, and found his eager gabble hard to follow, but his unassuming, friendly approach opened doors wherever he went. His interest in people and their lives was so obvious that they warmed to him at once.

He would explain his purpose and ask their permission, but they soon forgot that he was taking pictures. He was refused on only two occasions. The Leica, and his handling of it, were very unobtrusive. He just clicked, and dodged here and there, while he chatted with them about what they were doing, or how things used to be done. He was against posing or staging a subject (or lighting it artificially) because he was so determined that his record should be completely authentic - a natural and honest picture of real life.

At that time, our bit of countryside existed in a curious mix of time zones. There were scattered pockets of it that were just as far behind the times as our valley, where life carried on in much the same way as it had soon after the Second World War. But, close by, you could find farms of a hundred acres or more, with Land Rovers in concrete yards, and electric milking machines humming in breezeblock sheds. It was a peculiar characteristic of North Devon that the two styles of life co-existed side by side well into the 1990s. There were perhaps two reasons for this: geography and local temperament.

The area bounded by Exmoor to the north-east, and the coast to the north and west, is a wriggling maze of lanes, many of them founded by Anglo-Saxon pioneers in the eighth century. The only major road runs through from Exeter to Barnstaple and the northern seaside resorts; there has never been very much reason for visiting traffic to turn aside on the way. North Devon doesn’t have the money that the southern part of the county has - nor its sunny climate. A lot of the land is difficult to farm, consisting of small fields of poor, shaley soil, sodden and hilly. We get more than our share of rain.

But the area has its own quiet beauty. Its hills are on an intimate scale, and its winding river valleys deep and secretive. It is very green, and rich in wild flowers. It also has a great many trees, in the large oak plantations which flank those valleys, in the overgrown hedgerows, and in corners of soggy scrub that no one has ever bothered with - all of which give it the sense of remoteness and the dishevelled charm which so appealed to the artist in James…

The farming people of this countryside have stayed put for centuries. They moved about within a local area, as work dictated: younger sons went off to start up on their own, and labourers were moved on from their tied cottages, but they kept their sense of belonging because they left a network of relations all over the district - and because they loved the place. Few set foot out of the county unless forced to by war. This rootedness went with a self-sufficient independence of mind, and an innate conservatism. The way their fathers had done things was good enough for them; and they viewed new-fangled methods with suspicion - an attitude which preserved the historic landscape created by their forebears.

It wasn’t an easy way of life - even in the 1970s and ‘80s, when James was recording it. Money was scarce, and farm labour even scarcer. If their children didn’t want to stay on and help, and if they couldn’t afford much in the way of machinery, small farmers found it hard to spend time and energy on repairs or improvements. They survived by patching up and improvising, and by neighbourly arrangements of mutual help with others in the same boat. Factors beyond their control, like Common Market regulations and epidemics of disease, added restrictions and dreaded paperwork to their problems, but they carried on patiently because they were used to putting up with things. They didn’t want to leave the land that meant so much to them.

James admired this quality. He didn’t know much about farming when he started, but he soon came to appreciate the commitment it involved day in, day out, and the sheer hard slog it demanded in all weathers. Also, as a craftsman himself, he understood the rewards of such work. He was determined that his record would pay tribute to that stoicism, and that attachment.

This meant that he, too, had to be about early and late, to meet cows coming in to be milked or to catch hay-making in a summer dusk; and he stood for hours in the mud and pouring rain, or struggled through snowdrifts in an east wind, in order to make a true picture of that kind of life. But it was not too much of a hardship for James because he loved to use low light - especially in the early morning - and because extremes of weather were so photogenic. Breughel and Thomas Bewick were often in the back of his mind as he worked...

Not for James the swift anonymous style of Cartier-Bresson, who usually slipped a naked Leica out of his jacket pocket, clicked, and melted away into the crowd. But then James’s working style was a more engaged one from the start. He was part of the community, not an outsider. He didn’t want to take people unawares. But he did want them to be living their lives unselfconsciously. So he talked to them; explained about the archive and its purpose, asked if they would mind if he took a few photos for it, and took an interest in whatever they were doing. Then he let them get on with it.

He travelled far and wide to begin with, but came to feel that there were more than enough subjects to cover in the immediate locality, so he spent most of his time in an area within a radius of about ten miles from home. Over a quarter of his archive was taken in our parish of Dolton. But, even though his patch was so small, he never felt he had completed his task.’

Peter Beacham, in his Guardian obituary of Ravilious (October 1999), wrote,

‘Time after time a Ravilious photograph brings out some aspect of our common humanity. ... His pictures resonate with integrity and spiritual power, conveying, just like a great painting, so much more than the subject they ostensibly portray.’ I hope this introduction, and Robin’s selection, will encourage you to look deeper into this remarkable photographer. A selection of James’s images follow with notes by Robin.

Additional Information:

Website: www.jamesravilious.com

The English Eye exhibition mounted by the RPS in 1997, now resides in the Burton Gallery in Bideford. They will be showing it this autumn (6th October – 30th December) as part of their 70 year anniversary celebrations.

To enquire about buying darkroom prints, please contact Robin at robin@ravilious.net

All James’s Archive negatives, the digital prints of them, and the copyrights in them, belong to the Beaford Archive, who kindly allowed these images to be used, beafordarchive.org - beaford.org

Dr Paul Bangay visiting an elderly patient, Langtree, North Devon, 1981.

Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

James was always on the lookout for situations that were rarely seen on camera. So he was very pleased to be invited by Dr Bangay to record him at work on his rounds. (The patients’ permission was obtained, of course, but luckily for James, there were no issues about model release forms in those days.) Dr Bangay’s introductions allowed him access, he might never otherwise have had, to private rooms and personal moments. He was very careful not to abuse the privilege. Despite his six-foot frame, his working style was unobtrusive. His approach was friendly, he only used available light, and his analogue Leica M3 was so small and quiet he could take touchingly intimate pictures without either doctor or patient remembering that he was there.

George Stoneman, farmer, Skellies, Riddlecombe, North Devon, 1975.

Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

It was against James’s principles to set anything up or pose people. He wanted to record them living their lives as unselfconsciously as possible. He followed them about chatting while they got on with their work. Like so many of his portraits, this one was taken in the middle of such a conversation. George was thinking as they talked – probably about that favourite topic ‘the old days’ - and though he could see James holding the camera to his eye, he was not wary of it. To my mind, this shot says far more about George’s character, and the life of farmers like him, than if he had posed looking straight into the lens waiting for the shutter to click.

Dick French & family watching a Cup Final, Brendon Barton, Exmoor, 1985.

Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

‘Free-wheeling’ with no fixed destination, as he often did, James chanced on this family shearing. He introduced himself and photographed them at work. They then invited him in to watch the Cup Final on TV. This gave him a fine opportunity to record the group in their home setting and completely at ease. He was always interested in photographing audiences rather than the events they were watching. Absorbed, they were more relaxed.

Men playing boules, Le Monastier, Cévennes, France, 1982.

Photograph by James Ravilious (Private Image).

Perhaps in homage to his first photographic hero Henri Cartier-Bresson, this picture is a good illustration of ‘the decisive moment’. None of James’s other exposures of this scene captured the dance of legs and shadows so well. He took it at the beginning of a three-week trip on foot through the bleak mountainous Cévennes in Southern France with an artist friend, Tony Foster. They were following in the steps of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson who walked it in 1879. Stevenson took a troublesome donkey to carry his luggage; James and Tony used an obliging golf trolley.

View towards Iddesleigh and Dartmoor, c. 1985.

Photograph by James Ravilious (Private Image).

A favourite view James went back to year after year. He took it in many different seasons and at different times of the day. The classical composition shows the influence of his earlier training as an artist. This version (his best) was made on a 6.5” x 8.5” plate negative in a homemade 10” x 13” x 7” wooden box based on those the Victorian photographers used. Like them, he had to compose with the view upside down. It was one of his many experiments in pursuit of less grain and more depth of field. But the anachronistic piece of kit required a thick black cloth to cover him and the camera, a light-proof bag to change the plates in, and a massive wooden tripod. It proved too cumbersome for work out of doors.

Olive Bennett and her Red Devon cows, Cupper’s Piece, Beaford, North Devon, 1979.

Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

The ethics of documenting daily life were always on James’s mind. Though honest realism was very important, he was anxious not to intrude, or exploit. One or two people have thought this photo of Olive is unkind. However, Olive herself never complained. She was a feisty lady; she’d certainly have let him know if she was annoyed! In fact, she had a soft spot for him, and like many of his farming subjects, she was pleased that he took an interest in her tough and solitary life.

Running for the school bus, Atherington, North Devon, 1982.

Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

One of the great advantages of living and working for so long in one place was that James could sometimes plan ahead. He could return to a likely place when the angle of the light would be best, and anticipate good settings for photogenic happenings. For instance, he would get permission to climb a church tower to picture a village coming to life early in the morning. He loved an unusual viewpoint and would remain there, in the cold, waiting for hours for something interesting to happen.

Ivor Brock rescuing a lamb in a blizzard, Millhams, Dolton, Devon, 1978.

Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

Many of North Devon’s smallholders were leading pretty hard lives in the 1970s. They were getting older, but few could afford much in the way of machinery or help. Bad weather, like the prolonged deep snow of 1978, made things a great deal worse. James was out with them all day to record just how tough it was. He waded through the drifts dragging hay bales or stood about recording these farmers till his fingers were too cold to operate the camera.

Orchard, early morning, West Park, Iddesleigh, Devon, c. 1985.

Photograph by James Ravilious (Private Image).

James admired the work of Edwin Smith, a family friend, who took wonderful photographs of British buildings, large and small, in the 1940s and 50s before streets were full of cars and signs. In the early 1980s Edwin’s widow, the writer Olive Cook, gave James one of Edwin’s cameras, an old bellows model, the Ica. Using 6cm x 9cm plates, among others, he developed a more leisurely, reflective style, concentrating on artistic composition in landscape and the subtlety of light effects. He would go out at dawn to catch dew, mist or frost in the early light when shadows were longest.

Kitchen implements, Rashleigh Mill, Bridge Reeve, near Chulmleigh, North Devon, c.1995.

Photograph by James Ravilious (Private Image).

Everyday objects appealed to James because of what they said about their owners. He found this intriguing mix of useful implements in a bachelor’s kitchen, property of expert thatcher, Bill Hammond, whom he often photographed thatching roofs, building old-fashioned wheat ricks, or making cider in his homemade press using traditional West Country varieties of apple from his lovely old orchard.

Priest in a cloister, San Gimignano, Italy, 1978.

Photograph by James Ravilious (Private Image).

Whenever he went abroad, it was the everyday that James was particularly interested in rather than the famous sights. He would look for street scenes and rural life, just as he did in Devon, trying to get under the skin of a different countryside. In the back of his mind were the early Renaissance artists he particularly loved. Sometimes I think he was seeing 20th-century life through their eyes.

Farm and goats, La Vernède, Cévennes, France, 1982.

Photograph by James Ravilious (Private Image).

Like many of the classical artists he admired, James felt the need for an actor in his landscapes to bring life to a scene – as John Constable had with his ubiquitous boy in a scarlet waistcoat. If there were no humans about, James would wait patiently for a dog or a cat, or even a bird, to place themselves conveniently. In this lovely valley, covered in sweet chestnut forest, the white goat gave him just that little foreground zing that adds to the sense of distance in the view beyond.