John Davies - Cross Currents

1st edition published by Ffotogallery/Cornerhouse, 1992
Format: Softcover with flaps
Pages: 68
Condition: Very Good. Some minor signs of age.

Cross Currents comprises a series of rural and industrial landscapes made in each of the 12 countries that made the European Union in 1992. Davies began photographing in mainland Europe in 1984 with a commission in Berlin and the most recent photographs in this book were taken in Cork, Ireland in the summer of 1992. Collectively they portray Europe at the crossroads of a sustained period of urban and rural regeneration.
John Davies is one of the most significant British landscape photographers of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. He began photographing rural Britain in the mid-1970s, later stating: ‘I thought I was committing a political act in making pictures in which I wanted people to experience this respect for the land, a respect which people like Margaret Thatcher don’t seem to have. But I decided to get away from this Romantic landscape because I felt that those pictures were mostly appreciated by viewers who appreciate that sort of thing anyway’. In 1981 he began what would become an ongoing investigation and documentation of the legacy of industrialization on the industrial and post-industrial landscape of England’s towns and cities.