Overview
Roberts finds beauty in the mundane; the result is an elegiac exploration of identity, attachment to home and land, and the relationship between people and place.
Simon Roberts travelled throughout England in a motorhome between August 2007 and September 2008 to produce a series of large-format colour photographs of the English at leisure. Roberts' national survey was informed by the photography of his predecessors Tony Ray Jones, John Davies and Martin Parr, and by the romantic tradition of English landscape painting. We English builds on his first major body of work, Motherland (2007), with the same themes of identity, memory and belonging resonating throughout. Photographing ordinary people engaged in a variety of pastimes, Roberts finds beauty in the mundane; the result is an elegiac exploration of identity, attachment to home and land, and the relationship between people and place.
Roberts' work is significant because he combines a respect for his subject and the desire to communicate important social, economic and political issues...... His approach is one of creating wide-ranging surveys of our time, which he does through eloquent and arresting photographs; images which exhibit a disciplined compositional restraint, richness of palette, and which each function as an individual narrative.
Greg Hobson, Curator of Photographs, National Media Museum
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication We English, published by Chris Boot Ltd 2009. The book has just been selected as one of Martin Parr's 'Best Books of the Decade' in association with the PhotoIreland Festival 2011.
Roberts finds beauty in the mundane; the result is an elegiac exploration of identity, attachment to home and land, and the relationship between people and place.
