In November 2010, after a photographic lull of half a year, Jem Southam made a photograph on the banks of the River Exe in Devon. It became the first in The River Winter, a series he continued through late autumn and into the earliest signs of spring, returning to chosen locations at regular intervals. Not a travelogue, but an exacting record of one winter’s changing light, water and ground.

The book follows a single winter, from freeze to thaw to flood, a cycle Richard Hamblyn’s essay places within the climatic forces that shaped the northern hemisphere and continue to inform cultural ideas of winter. Southam’s method is patient and positional: fixed viewpoints, repeated visits, attention to subtle agencies of change. The sequence of ten by eight colour contact prints makes that passage tangible.

Southam, born in 1950, has been a key figure in British landscape photography for twenty-five years. His work is held by institutions including the Rijksmuseum, Museum Folkwang and the Yale Center for British Art, and has been shown in solo exhibitions at Tate St Ives in 2004 and the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2006. The River Winter is among his most concentrated bodies of work, drawing his interest in place and duration into a single seasonal arc.

For collectors, the appeal lies less in spectacle than in the project’s coherence: a defined season, a river, a set of return visits, and a collaboration with a writer who sets local weather within deep time. MACK’s 2012 publication presents the series complete, making visible how a landscape is remade by ordinary climatic events. It is a quiet, structurally rigorous book, and its attention to incremental change is what gives it lasting interest.