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Jack Ravilious, photographer extraordinaire


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Is it just me?

 

I'd never heard of this gentlemen until a thread over on APUG surprised virtually everybody. His unbelievably captivating images seem to be mostly ... masterpieces! He worked primarily in the English countryside doing rural landscapes, animals and people from the early 70s into the early 90s - with only an early Leica and uncoated 50mm lens. All I can say is, move way over HCB.

 

I don't think I've ever been so struck. Some here know of him - certainly those in the UK - but for we who don't, well, just enjoy the sites. Both are way short on technical info but surely the Brits can help flesh-out a probably-fascinating M.O of one of their own.

 

http://pro.corbis.com/search/searchFrame.aspx

http://www.jamesravilious.com/gallery.asp

 

Bruce

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Bruce,

 

I agree his work is quite spectacular. The first Corbis link didn't work for me, but the second did.

 

I would like to hear more about the technicla aspects. How he developed and printed and about uncoated lenses.

 

Thanks for the link.

 

Mitchell

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Bruce

 

James Ravilious has always been one of my very favourite photographers, ever since I first encountered his work in about 1972 when I stayed at the Beaford Centre in North Devon, where he was photographer in residence. His father, Eric, was a fine artist and wood-engraver. James had a superb feel for landscape photography, and captured the Devon countryside in a series of beautiful B/W prints which spoke to me in a way which few others have done, before or since. The other English photographer who I would rank with Ravilious (and is still living) is Fay Godwin. I have just about every collection she has published. Both these fine practioners used Leicas for their 35mm work, but Godwin also used a Hasselblad for a great deal of her more formal landscape photographs. They deserve to be better known, but their particular style is so deeply rooted in a very British landscape tradition (very understated) that they will probably always be an acquired taste.

 

John

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John - Thanks for the Interesting obit, a good man, and here again, HCB pops up as an inspirational factor, an influence that worked beautifully in his only-occasional people pictures.

 

My favorite cousin's daughter lives in London. Real Film Photographs. HMMM.

 

Bruce

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He is a wonderful photographer, very sensitive, documenting lifestyles that have since disappeared. His father, too, was an excellent war artist, a contemporary of Paul Nash. Yesterday I wandered into a museum at lunchtime purely to look at his lithographs of submariners - he died on active service, when the Air Sea Rescue plane on which he was flying went missing.

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Rob

 

I didn't realise Fay Godwin had died. What sad news. I've always loved her pictures, particularly after I spent some time in the Forest of Dean in the late '80s and bought her book about Dean. Wonderful photo-documentary work. It struck a chord with me, because I had been working on a similar project in the china-clay district north of St Austell, here in Cornwall. It incorporated MF photographs, interviews with people living and working in the area, and some poetry from local authors. I never quite got around to putting it all together, inevitably, but some of the pictures did get used in my book on the china-clay industry published by the Twelveheads Press.

 

John

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That's the name I was searching for in another thread when talking about lens quality, "is Apo, Asph and the kind better than" type of discussion.

I came to know him in Leica mag many years ago, it shows that the M system is much more varied than currently limited to street photograhy.

Lovely photographing approach anyway.

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