EMPTY DAYS PADDY SUMMERFIELD

Paddy was the first person to walk through the doors of the original Photographers Workshop in June 1982. He has been my friend and teacher ever since. I learned from Paddy that a photograph doesn’t have to be about a thing, it can be just about a feeling.

His latest book ‘Empty Days’ is a testament to the idea that art is about feeling and not necessarily decorative. Like Nan Golding or Richard Billingham Paddy does not shy away from showing “the tragic lives he encountered, lives that touched him because they reflected his own struggles, he made images that would tell their stories, his own story.”

Paddy Summerfield Empty Days

From his publisher:

… a sustained enquiry and search for understanding and meaning in a sometimes-bleak interior landscape … the great success of ‘Empty Days’ is in drawing the viewer fully into Paddy’s world… and as in life, it is both rewarding and on occasions disturbing.
– John Goto in Photomonitor, March 2018

…………….

“I would say Empty Days is my road trip, through the places I know – on foot.”

In run-down streets and shabby cafés Paddy Summerfield found his pictures for Empty Days. Among the tragic lives he encountered, lives that touched him because they reflected his own struggles, he made images that would tell their stories, his own story.

“This is the world I know, it could be anywhere, a place we have all seen before. I am sad, the world is sad. I don’t know if I take photographs to embrace sadness or or push it away.”

Paddy Summerfield Empty Days

For Empty Days Summerfield has found emblems of the great themes: religion, sex, and death. Yet among the bleakness of various addictions, the ravages of drinking, of pills, he shows no spiritual comfort, no sexual joy, only the search for love in an unloving world, an unsatisfied spiritual longing. Along pavements and pathways, in claustrophobic rooms or open spaces, he finds the isolated figures, lost in thought or caught in a flash of emotion, to express the yearnings and pain that so many of us share. And where no people are shown, the human traces – an abandoned bicycle, a fallen doll, a tangle of nettles and barbed wire – continue themes of loss and melancholy. Yet however powerless or worn down the people and places shown, these pictures offer compassion, not judgement. A handful of troubling portraits, suggesting powerful and complex emotions, punctuate Empty Days, and intensify our sense of a narrative, albeit elusive and incomplete, as the photographs lead us through a fragile and fragmented world to an ending that suggests the possibility of hope.

Paddy Summerfield Empty Days

Oxford-based, Paddy Summerfield, trained at Guildford School of Art in the Photography and the Film departments. His work has been shown in many galleries, including the ICA, The Barbican, The Serpentine Gallery, and The Photographers’ Gallery. His work is in the collections of the Arts Council and of the V&A, as well as in numerous private collections. Empty Days is his third book published by Dewi Lewis. His earlier book Mother and Father(2014) was widely acclaimed, and featured in several lists of the ‘Best Photobooks of The Year’.

You can buy this exquisite book here

Paddy Summerfield – The Oxford Pictures 1968-1978

It may have taken too long in coming but now there is a book of images by Paddy Summerfield from his early Oxford period. You may not know Paddy but he has been part of the photographic firmament of Oxford for ever. I first met him on June 6th 1982. I had just opened the doors of my new business, The Photographers Workshop, and in strode Paddy. I had heard tell of this mythic man and when he said who he was and could he help I thought this is it, I am on the road. Paddy and I have been friends now for more than 30 years and I cherish that time. I remember the first time I saw his Oxford pictures appearing under the red lights of the darkroom and wondering how this man before me could have taken such brilliant photographs. Prior to seeing his work I had only seen similar in books by people who were really famous, and this man was in my darkrooms.

He shared his passion and knowledge with anyone who would benefit; teaching, mentoring and helping and never for reward, he didn’t want money he just wanted to be involved with interesting images and people.

So to his book, a beautiful edition with many of the pictures from a period when Oxford was still the Oxford of memory. What has amazed me about the book is how close the reproductions are to the prints he would work on in the dark, they have a quality, an intensity that I don’t see from digital work. This is a wondrous thing to behold, I would recommend you find a copy and spend time indulging your love of photography. Do not expect warm, honey coloured stones, this Oxford is much darker and more interesting.

Go to Paddy’s website to find more information http://paddysummerfield.com/

 

The New York Times no less reviewed this book, go here to see 16 images on their gallery

Sprawled on grass, floating down a river, or gazing blankly into the distance — all the subjects captured, unawares, in the photographer Paddy Summerfield’s new book “The Oxford Pictures” share a certain listlessness. In 1968, having been “thrown out” of Guildford School of Art (“the staff weren’t particularly sympathetic towards my vision”), Summerfield returned to his hometown of Oxford, England. He spent the summers of the next 10 years wandering around the grounds of the elite Oxford University, where he photographed students at leisure.

What he sensed at the university, he says, was an atmosphere that mirrored how he felt about his own life. “I was young,” he says, “It’s a young person’s vision, noticing girls and noticing other people’s relationships — but I was always outside everything.” He recognised a similar nervousness in the subjects of his photos, who hovered between the social rituals of university and an existential uncertainty. At the time, Summerfield was heavily influenced by John Lennon — and there is something personal and deeply melancholy about these images. “I set out to show heartache and disappointment,” he says. “It’s about feeling… well, I suppose, isolated and lonely, and full of sexual anxiety.

Some of the most striking photographs in the book are those of students lying in the grounds of the campus, presumably asleep in the sun. They are crumpled into one another, arms often flung outwards; it’s not immediately clear whether they’re dead or alive. “There’s one of a girl who is lying down, and her skirt has slightly risen, and she does look as though she’s falling, in a dream,” says Summerfield. Years later, he came across photographer I. Russel Sorgi’s 1942 image of a woman in the act of suicide, falling from an eighth-floor window: “Her body language is exactly the same as that woman, that girl lying on the grass,” Summerfield says.

A selection of Summerfield’s pictures was shown at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1976. But this month, 40 years later, they become the subject of a new book. Summerfield says that the fashionable British documentary photographers of the time — Don McCullin, David Hurn, Ian Berry, Tony Ray Jones — were more preoccupied with society than with introspection. “They were interested in the world around them,” he says. “I’m interested in the interior world.”

Buy the book for someone you know would appreciate it, or better still for yourself. “The Oxford Pictures,” £30, dewilewis.com.

 

My favourite photo books of 2014

This article caught my eye because at number one it featured the famous Oxford photographer Paddy Summerfield. I have been lucky enough to know Paddy since 1982 and it is with great joy that I see he is getting recognition for his emotive imagery.

Mother and Father by Paddy Summerfield – £30

I have to thank a sentimental Sean O’Hagan for introducing me to Paddy Summerfield’s moving series, Mother and Father. It is a tender documentation of the last ten years of his parent’s marriage as Alzheimer’s came to claim them. The touching photographs, shot in black and white, allow us to see their love and tenderness in huge measure. They are deeply personal photographs but we can all identify with the emotional content.

Summerfield’s poetic description “I recorded my mother’s loss of the world, my father’s loss of his wife and, eventually, my loss of them both” describes his melancholy and moving journey.

Photographed in the neatly kept garden at their home in the Welsh countryside, Summerfield’s moving, gentle narrative captures subtle gestures of love revealing the bond formed during their 60-year marriage. The couple, their bodies gently bent in unison, tenderly hold hands, or link arms behind their backs, and stroll though the place they love. Eventually nature reclaims the garden, and the garden chairs become a poignant memorial to happier times.

www.dewilewispublishing.com

there are of course other books in this list by  Cheryl Newman in the Telegraph

 

Paddy Summerfield – Mother and Father

Here is a little reminder in case you missed the previous post whilst sunning yourself in some sunny location

Dear Paddy has been an institution in Oxford for decades, he was the very first person to appear at the original Photographers Workshop on 6th June 1982, he shambled through the door and said, ‘hi I’m Paddy can I help’.  He has been a great source of inspiration and support for so many fresh faced new photographers that there is probably a book just on who has been influenced by the great man. Now as part of Photography Oxford he is showing his touching and long term body of work Mother and Father.

During the festival there are showings of Paddy’s exhibition in the garden where the images were created from 6pm each evening 337 Banbury Road

This first public showing of Paddy Summerfield’s Mother And Father is part of the new PHOTOGRAPHYOXFORD 2014 Biennale, and also marks the publication of his book (Dewi Lewis Publishing). The images will be installed in the actual garden where most of the photographs were taken. The exhibition and  book document the final decade of a 60 year marriage, that began in the summer of 1939 as war approached, and ended under the shadows of another struggle: the trials of old age and his mother’s loss of memory. Summerfield reflects through the lens of his own vision the bond between his mother and father, which even dementia could not break.

As Gerry Badger writes: “Nothing much happens in these pictures, just everyday, commonplace, important things. The Summerfields tend their garden, they walk and sit within its protective embrace, they embrace each other.”....READ MORE HERE

©Paddy Summerfield

 

 

©Paddy Summerfield

Location: PhotographyOxford 2014

Venue 22: 337 Banbury Road OX2 7PL

Opening Hours: 6.30-8.30pm daily

Paddy Summerfield

Mother And Father

14.09.14 – 05.10.14

PhotographyOxford 2014 / Oxford / England

Paddy Summerfield – Mother and Father

Dear Paddy has been an institution in Oxford for decades, he was the very first person to appear at the original Photographers Workshop on 6th June 1982, he shambled through the door and said, ‘hi I’m Paddy can I help’.  He has been a great source of inspiration and support for so many fresh faced new photographers that there is probably a book just on who has been influenced by the great man. Now as part of Photography Oxford he is showing his touching and long term body of work Mother and Father.

This first public showing of Paddy Summerfield’s Mother And Father is part of the new PHOTOGRAPHYOXFORD 2014 Biennale, and also marks the publication of his book (Dewi Lewis Publishing). The images will be installed in the actual garden where most of the photographs were taken. The exhibition and  book document the final decade of a 60 year marriage, that began in the summer of 1939 as war approached, and ended under the shadows of another struggle: the trials of old age and his mother’s loss of memory. Summerfield reflects through the lens of his own vision the bond between his mother and father, which even dementia could not break.

As Gerry Badger writes: “Nothing much happens in these pictures, just everyday, commonplace, important things. The Summerfields tend their garden, they walk and sit within its protective embrace, they embrace each other.”....READ MORE HERE

©Paddy Summerfield

 

 

©Paddy Summerfield

Location: PhotographyOxford 2014

Venue 22: 337 Banbury Road OX2 7PL

Opening Hours: 6.30-8.30pm daily

Paddy Summerfield

Mother And Father

14.09.14 – 05.10.14

PhotographyOxford 2014 / Oxford / England

Josef Koudelka – the great Czech photographer

Today I start an occasional series on the great photographers, those who are referred to as masters. This series will be to introduce you to photographers who you may have heard of but never investigated or perhaps you have never come across and so are completely new to you.

Today I introduce Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka

(1938-) Documentary, Landscape, Photojournalism

Biography: Born in a tiny village of Moravia, Koudelka began photographing his family and surroundings as a teenager with a 6 x 6 Bakelite camera.

He was trained at the Technical University in Prague and worked as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and Bratislava from 1961-67. He had been able to obtain an old Rolleiflex and in 1961, while working as a theater photographer in Prague, he also started a detailed study of the gypsies of Slovakia, who were then undergoing further attempts to “assimilate” them within the Czech state. His work was the subject of an exhibition in Prague in 1967.

In 1968 Koudelka extended his project to gypsy communities in Rumania and that same year recorded the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact armies. Smuggled out of the country with the help of Czech curator Anna Farova and published with the initials P.P. ( Prague photographer) to protect his family, the highly dramatic pictures showing Russian tanks rolling into Prague and the Czech resistance became international symbols and won him the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal………more

As a member of The Magnum Photo Agency he is already considered one of the greats alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa etc. This link is a short film about his work of the Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 from the Magnum in Motion series

Further information can be found in this excellent Guardian interview with Koudelka in 2008

Koudelka is a photographer whose work is impossible to ignore because each image throws up so many stories, as you look at a picture and start to try to understand the reasons why the shutter was released at that moment a range of emotions, expectations and ideas come to you. His work is rarely decorative, it is always demanding and about difficult subjects. In some ways the early work of Oxford photographer Paddy Summerfield reminds me of Koudelka, Paddy’s early work is on permanent exhibition in the reception area of the Old Bank Hotel on the High Street in Oxford. Paddy is a reluctant interwebber so although he is often mentioned he no longer has his own site but this might give you some idea of his work

The hope is that with these occasional introductions you will find someone whose work you are absorbed by and undertake further investigations or maybe even go and buy a book