Forthcoming from Raft

The Raft of Carrots emerged from Jem Southam pondering a dream, a recurring nightmare from his early childhood. In the dream a huge wave swept up his back garden, higher than the tallest tree, it continued to endlessly brake and roar as he turned and struggled to run away.

From where had this dream emerged into his subconscious?

This led him to reflect on the prevalence of ‘Flood Myths’ within our shared origin stories, and the possibility the we all carry ancestral narratives within us which influence and shape our psychological and philosophical relationship to the world around us.

Through the making The Red River (1982-1987), while living in the mining areas of the West of Cornwall, he had found the photographs that he made often inadvertently contained glints of these stories – a farting pig at dusk evoked for him John Bunyan’s ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’; and a winding stream, a river flowing from the Garden of Eden. 

We walk through the world carrying these narratives within us, The Raft of Carrots is 20 colour photographs of fragmentary and inexplicable narratives, often featuring ‘raft’ motifs, which reflect on the bliss and trauma of our existence, the wonder and the fears that sit deep within us. 

After completing and first exhibiting The Red River in 1987 Jem Southam had moved from West Cornwall to Devon to teach photography at Exeter College of Art and Design. Lost for a subject or site to photograph he began to wander locally with his Plaubel Makina camera and began to notice and photograph these small incidents.

 The book was originally published by The Photographers’ Gallery in 1992 to accompany the first exhibition of the work. It contains an essay by David Chandler, the curator of the exhibition, and four short stories written by Jem himself. The small book quickly sold out and has thus been unavailable for over 30 years.