In 1788, work began on a manganese mine at Upton Pyne. It was an open-cast operation, small enough that a few men with ladders, picks and shovels could run it. The lode was rich; once refined, the ore left Exeter Quay for London and Bristol, where it went mainly into the making of glass. Output fell away and stopped by 1823, leaving a deep pit—shallow on the east side beside the road, deepening westward under an overhanging cliff. Water did the rest. That pond is Jem Southam’s subject.

One photograph in the sequence is dated June 1996; the book itself appears in 2024. The distance between those two dates describes the tempo Southam permits himself. He has spent decades on the countryside of the South West, and the places he returns to are rarely spectacular: a hedge line, a field edge, a body of still water. What holds his attention is duration—the unhurried revision of a site as one use of it ends and another, less deliberate, takes over.

The argument here is made by accumulation rather than declaration. A mine becomes a pit, a pit becomes a pond, and the pond becomes something people pass without knowing what lies beneath the surface. Southam records that forgetting without correcting it and without mourning it. The photographs are quiet in the way that only long attention can be quiet.

For a collector, the interest lies in the concentration. This is a project fixed to a single named place with a documented history, published in English as a hardcover in 2024, and it belongs to a sustained engagement with the English landscape that regional museums have begun to acquire and display—a photograph from this series appeared in a museum showing of recent acquisitions. Its value is not in scarcity claims but in what a patient photographer can find in one small, unremarkable cavity in the ground.

Readers who follow British landscape photography will recognise the method; those new to it will find an unusually clear demonstration of how a place can be looked at until its history surfaces.