Between 1968 and 1978, Paddy Summerfield photographed Oxford students during the summer terms. He was no older than the people he pictured, and he worked close to their uncertainties rather than above them. The university’s lawns and rivers appear in his frames, but they serve as settings for hesitation and solitude, not as postcard scenery. “I was young and unsure and found a way to show this,” he has said, recalling the sense that parties and sociability belonged to other people, elsewhere. In the images, that admission becomes a method.
Summerfield studied photography and film at Guildford School of Art, and by 1967, while still in his first year, his work had appeared in Album and in spreads in Creative Camera. In 1976, Nicholas Serota, then director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, invited him to mount his first one-man exhibition, “Beneath The Dreaming Spires.” The photographs are now held by the Arts Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among other collections. Those facts are the outline of a career; the book is something more particular.
The Oxford Pictures gathers fifty-seven duotone photographs in a clothbound hardback of ninety-six pages, published by Dewi Lewis in 2016. The psychological register is sustained and unsparing. Yearning and sexual anxiety run through the sequence; solitary figures stand in for the photographer’s own isolation. Ritual governs the calendar: frivolity and romance give way to revision and examinations, then to celebrations that slide into excess and regret. Students depart and are replaced. Only the stones remain.
The book’s seriousness lies in that cyclic structure and in Summerfield’s refusal to sentimentalise either youth or the institution that frames it. Gerry Badger, writing about the work, called it a properly nostalgic vision devoid of sentimentality, and acknowledged that some viewers would find it bleak. For a collector, the value is not in scarcity claims but in the coherence of a ten-year project, brought into book form with the sequence and pace the photographs require.
