A single black-and-white photograph, made around 1983, shows a man standing alone on Gwithian beach in St Ives, Cornwall. That picture is the starting point of The Moth, Jem Southam’s book published by MACK in 2018, and it lingers over the volume even though the sequence that follows is made of colour photographs in which people are otherwise absent.

Southam returned intermittently to western Cornwall over three decades, drawn to a place shaped by marine and mining history and by the mythology of Celtic saints said to have been exiled to its shores. The resulting book, a linen hardback of 72 pages, is arranged less as a survey than as a drift of memories moving back and forth through time. Its imagery passes from meadow vistas to water streams, from forgotten houses to farm dogs waiting to be fed. The alliterative verse of the Old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer informs the rhythm of that passage.

What distinguishes The Moth is the way a singular, meditative moment governs a landscape emptied of its original subject. Sublime passages in the rural scene appear and are then eclipsed by the hazy recollection of that first photograph. Southam does not illustrate a story; he lets photographs hold their own time.

For collectors, the book is notable for its sustained attention to sequence and for the restraint of its making. It is a considered object from MACK, and its 72 pages ask to be read slowly, as a meditation on place, memory, and the persistence of a single image.