For four winters, Jem Southam returned to the same short reach of riverbank on the floodplain of the River Exe. He stayed as dusk thickened into darkness and as dawn light gathered, watching swans, geese and ducks come in to roost, then wake, preen, feed and settle into the day. Four Winters collects what those visits produced.

The method is patience rather than event. Southam photographs the same ground again and again, and the pictures accumulate the way weather does: no single frame carries the argument, but the sequence does. The riverbank becomes a stage, its daily cast arriving and dispersing on cue, and the camera records the small differences — water level, light, the position of the birds — that separate one morning from the next. The cycle he describes is millennia old; the variation is what the photographs are for. Published by Stanley/Barker in 2021, the book is a first edition hardcover of 120 pages, 29 by 25 centimetres, in English, its page size giving the riverbank views room to breathe.

The work belongs to Southam’s longer habit of returning to a single place over years, but its subject is narrower and more private than topography. Writing about the book, one reviewer set it beside loss and mortality — a reading the photographs never insist upon, yet one that makes their quiet more legible.

For a collector, the case rests on what is documented rather than asserted: a sustained four-year engagement with one site, an edit paced to let repetition do its work, and a first edition issued in hardcover by Stanley/Barker. It is a book about looking slowly at something that changes imperceptibly, and it asks the same of its reader.