The Floating Harbour in Bristol went quiet somewhere between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s. For centuries the docks had been the engine of the city’s commerce; when the working life drained out of them, what remained was a sculptural assembly of cranes, bridges, pump-houses, warehouses, offices, railways, terraced housing, ship-building yards with their dry docks, and sand yards. Jem Southam photographed this terrain between 1978 and 1983, in the interval before redevelopment began in earnest.

His subject is the infrastructure itself — disused, neglected, still standing. The photographs work as an archival record of an architectural landscape rather than an elegy; the industrial life of the docks, and the human stories bound up with it, are preserved in the record without being mourned. That restraint is the book’s distinguishing quality. Southam’s attention settles on structure, surface and the flat grey light of a port on hold, and the sequence moves through the dockland fabric without forcing a narrative of decline onto it.

The Harbour is published by RRB Photobooks in 2023 as a 93-page hardcover in a format of roughly 26 by 30 centimetres. The scale suits the subject: these are photographs of large, heavy things, and the plates give the bonded warehouses and dry docks the room they need. The period of change named in the title is local in its particulars and general in what it implies about Britain at the time, which gives the book a historical frame that outlasts the moment it records.

For collectors, the interest lies in the conjunction of period, place and method. Southam’s Bristol pictures were made while the harbour’s future was unresolved, and they describe a cityscape that no longer exists in that form. The book is equally a record of sustained looking at one place across five years, held together in a considered sequence. Anyone building a shelf around late twentieth-century British documentary and landscape photography will want to know it.