The pile of photobooks in my study just seems to get bigger and bigger but not yet quite to the point where it starts to totter and represent a physical threat. (The impact on my bank account is of course another matter and still perilous enough!) Fortunately they do not grumble too much if I take a while to getting around to writing anything about them.

Step up Sadie Catt’s impressive book about the Canadian town of Woodstock (in Ontario and not to be confused with its more infamous name-sake in New York state the other side of the border) and its inhabitants. I came across her work for the first time in the May issue of BJP this year and was immediately struck by it. Why mention it now? Because it very much fits with my thesis about the nature of landscape photography, that is it not just about pretty, picturesque views but also about the people that inhabit it, help to form, and are formed by it. Sometimes it is a matter of a book needing to settle into my consciousness (or unconscious?) for a while before I feel ready to write anything about it. For some reason that time has just arrived, not least because I realise, as I look over the pile of volumes waiting for my attention, and thinking about a lot of the books already in my library, that one of the things that really interests and engages me in photographic terms is work that deals with people in their local environment. Documentary, humanistic, socially engaged, topographical, environmental, and portrait, photography all collide, meet, mingle, and coalesce without boundaries and without categories being needed, helpful, nor particularly informative.

So this is a collection of portraits, some of them quite intimate, of inhabitants, many, if not all, of whom have tales to tell (though we are not taken into their confidence), mixed with various views of the town. Together they show a more nuanced and complex picture of the place than a merely topological approach might have made possible. This sort of approach I find so much more appealing and engaging, intriguing and challenging, than any straightforward depiction of a physical place.

It has to be said it is also just a rather beautiful physical piece of work. I am a bit of a sucker for nicely produced, artisanal, books, whatever the subject matter, as works of art in their own right. (There are any number of artists and small presses out there that I am more than happy to allow to help hoover up my savings, and fill my bookshelves.) The fact that this is a such a well considered, compassionate and empathetically engaged set of images also helps to ensure this volume’s place in my study.

Catt, S, (2019). Woodstock. From: The Lost Light Recordings

https://www.sadiecatt.com/woodstock

British Journal of Photography, Issue 7883, May 2019

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