(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - [James] I like to think of a photograph and a negative as sort of a silver watercolor, and like a watercolor, you know, particularly in English watercolor, which is full of, you know, England, we think of it as a land of mists and subtle tones, and I like the idea of silver, the gradations of a silver that you see in a good negative without those black and white extremes.

It does relate, I think, to Englishness and softness.

(gentle music continues) - He didn't catch me many times 'cause he was coming up the road.

He was coming down the road.

I'd walk backward.

- [Interviewer] Why is that?

- Well, he couldn't take a photo then, could he?

It was the wrong way, wasn't it?

Yeah, if he was coming up road, I'd go the other way around.

Maybe he was walking one way.

I'd walk the other.

Done that many times to him.

- He'd be talking, fiddling and looking and adjusting and talking to the person and doing this, and it was, you know, very few people realized that, actually, pictures were happening.

- Like you say with James, you wouldn't know he'd took it.

- No.

- Because it'd be like us over here talking and he'd come around the wall there, and before you notice him, he probably took three photos.

Then you go, "Oh, hello."

- And dodging about while he was talking too.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] James Ravilious is one of the great unknowns of British photography.

For almost 20 years, he took pictures of the day-to-day routine in the farming communities of North Devon, creating a unique and intimate record of rural life in the southwest of England.

Poignant images of a world in steady decline.

- To me, he's one of the great English photographers, actually.

He had the ability to find almost the surreal aspects of what he was photographing, and to identify those.

I mean, photography is quite good at catching those fugitive, you know, transitory moments, which I think he was excellent at.

- What he did is quite tremendous.

Not merely in historic terms, for example.

It's, as they say, a record of a passing way of life.

That might be true, probably is, but just image after image is a deeply beautiful and fulfilling one, I think.

(birds chirping) - [Narrator] James Ravilious was born just before war broke out in 1939.

His father was the renowned watercolorist and engraver Eric Ravilious.

Although James trained as a painter, he struggled to find his own artistic identity in the shadow of his famous father's reputation, but in 1969, he saw an exhibition of photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the greatest photojournalist of his generation.

For Ravilious, it was an epiphany.

He suddenly realized what photography could do and that it could be the way forward for him.

In 1972, James and his wife Robin were forced to move from London and start a new life in Devon.

- When we got to Devon, he went to the Beaford Center in the next-door village to see if he could get a teaching job, teaching painting or even wood engraving, and he did do a little bit of that, but John Lane, the director, the first director of Beaford, had already got this idea that the local area that Beaford served should be recorded because it was a very special area where country traditions were still going on, but it was very likely to change very quickly, and so he asked James to take a few photographs.

- He was just perfect for the job.

It was as if he'd been preparing for this work all his life.

I mean, it became a vocation.

- [Narrator] Over the next 17 years, he took more than 80,000 pictures.

He also encouraged the local community to share their private family photos, which he copied and added to the collection.

Together, this body of work became known as the Beaford Archive.

Three months before his death in 1999, James was interviewed as part of the British Library's oral history of British photography.

- [James] There was an absolutely perfect little rather rough and tumble Devon microcosm right at my doorstep.

Often, I'm attracted to, say, look across a field, and you see somebody.

One goes over to that body and whatever they're doing becomes a subject.

I like talking to people.

I like interfering or taking an interest.

So, as you pass a hedge, you see a flock of sheep.

All the simple things.

Just endless, endless subjects.

(birds chirping) - Ah.

We would go away mornings now, up past nine, quarter to 10, with the coach to take them up to Beacon Garage.

So I'd go down.

I was at the garage.

Walk over to the garage and ride my bicycle.

Fetch the coach after noon.

Ride your bicycle over and leave 'em.

Bring the coach back.

Tomorrow morning, take the coach over and ride your bike back.

(Olive laughs) Every day, you do that.

Blooming old coach.

It wouldn't work sometimes.

It was sods.

My father grabbed me as I was late for school then.

I missed the bus more than once.

- She and her father bred prize winners.

She's got a whole dresser full of prizes and rosettes from Hadley Market.

- Me cleaning the cows for about a fortnight before they went to market.

That's what my memories was.

(Olive laughs) That's right, 15.

The last one was mine.

I bought a cow in February and took him back in May and sold him, and that the last row set, the 15th was mine.

All of the rest was his, 14, but the 15th is mine.

That's my rosette.

He was standing on the road, I reckon, when he took that photo.

Right on the main road.

Could be.

That's where he caught me 'cause I didn't know he was around.

He showed me that photo.

I remember him showing me that photo.

- [Interviewer] What did you think when he showed it to you?

- "Oh, you devil (indistinct)!

I didn't know you were taking one!"

Everybody laughed at me 'cause my clothes were so short.

"Oh, that's nothing," I said.

No good wearing long skirts.

Your knickers get filthy dirty.

You gotta wore shorter (indistinct), if you understand me.

And I cleaned out giblet.

When you're told you have to do it, you had to do it, and that's the end of it.

He'll have nothing about it.

Good ol' James.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - [James] One of the great things about the photographer is black and white.

Black and white removes the problem of color in the English landscape, a problem that has beset many painters down the ages.

What do you do about green?

England is a very green country.

In a different culture, one might have been a different photographer, but, you know, I'm stuck with England.

I'm stuck with green, so that's important, that business of eliminating what has been a problem for painters down the ages, of how to survive in a very, very, very green landscape.

- [Narrator] James brought his artist's eye for light and composition to his new medium.

He experimented endlessly with equipment, adapting his techniques 'til he found a style that suited his painterly vision.

- He designed a sort of lens shade that really just vignetted to there.

I mean, he did this very, very carefully indeed so that there would no flare whatsoever coming in.

So he could shoot into the light without getting a huge amount of flare in it.

He got particularly interested in how he could use the older lenses that they had made in the 1930s, which were uncoated, which didn't have an anti-reflection coating on them.

The lens itself, which is quite low contrast, wasn't making the detail in the shadows go completely black, as it were.

There's detail in the shadows and there's detail in the highlights of the image.

- He cut bits off when he put tape on and I can't tell you what he did.

Almost everything he owned has been changed in some way.

See, there, he squared the circle black tape and he would file bits off.

Collectors of Leicas are absolutely shocked.

He treated things with no respect, but one of the things he tried to control was dazzle from the metal bits, so he put tape.

One of his cameras was completely cocooned in that tape for that reason.

That's the Leica.

I think it's an M3, and the various lenses and the little view finder.

That view finder, that fits on the top like that.

- [James] And that view-who, as they called it, the right way around finder, is the reason, I would say, without it, I don't know if I could have become a photographer, 'cause it gives such a wonderful, precise, to-the-edge idea of a composition.

You are incredibly clearly informed of what's happening in the corners without any strain, and so the whole picture is accessible at an instant as if you were standing back.

- [Narrator] But James didn't stand back.

He didn't play the neutral observer, like many other documentary photographers.

He became intimately involved with the local community and built strong relationships with the people he photographed.

- [James] The place where I lived, Addisford, had a little valley called Millhams, and there lived Archie Parkhouse and Iver Brock.

Iver Brock, well, you'd call him a laborer.

A laborer.

He would just stand about and Archie would, they'd swear at each other.

He'd always got a fag and his dogs, and everything was going wrong, just what he wanted.

It was already sort of delightfully messy, very like, you know, George Morland, or, you know, these sort of English things, and his rundown cottages, and everything was run down in the most delightful way.

None of the concrete and big machines.

It was all rough and wonderful, wonderful, because it's so rich.

There's so, so many textures, and about their faces are interesting.

What they do is, you know, ferrets, and their whole thing was salmon fishing, and a wonderful house, lovely old furniture.

A rich little pattering of life, you know, whereas you would go to, say, let's say take a modern farm.

You go to a modern farm, concrete, Range Rover, immaculate cows, all clean, nasty iron gates.

It's like a sort of clinic.

It doesn't have that texture of, you know, old cob and thatch and mud and muck and swearing and you know.

- I would say that probably James', the photo he's proudest of is a wonderful portrait of Archie, and he was really James' favorite, favorite subject.

James and Archie and Cartier-Bresson all have the same birthday, the 22nd of August, which I think is rather neat, and James used to go around and get given a tumbler of whiskey.

It was always nice when they got together, and he let James take anything he wanted, including his private home moments.

That's his bed.

This is after Alice had died, and I find this very touching 'cause I think it must have been laid out like that by Alice, his wife, and I don't suppose it ever moved after that.

Not at all the sort of thing you would expect Archie to have.

That's his Christmas dinner with Jo Curzon, who was his neighbor, and a huge help to him after his wife died.

- [Jo] Archie used to pull his leg a lot, didn't he?

- [Speaker] Yes.

- If we had something really repulsive, he'd try and tell James that it would make a really good photograph and try and get him to come and photograph it, but James didn't like anything that was nasty.

He didn't like things that were covered in maggots or bits of cut-up lamb, which had been cut up to get it out on a difficult lambing and things like that.

He'd say that, that it was too nasty to photograph.

It was Archie who was always on about it, but you must know that because you've seen the photographs.

They don't show anything really horrid, do they?

But James was present at a lot of things that were really horrid, although he did tend to fade away fairly quickly.

He didn't like the hard side.

- Well, he was seeing it as a picture, wasn't he, really?

- [Jo] And he wanted it to be a pleasant picture, more or less.

- He wasn't just a documentary photographer.

He had his own view about how he wanted to do that, how he wanted to make the pictures, and that view of how he wanted to make the pictures came out of his background as a painter.

He came from an artistic family.

He liked English painting of a certain sort, English engraving.

I mean Bewick and Palmer.

He had this eye, I think, which was very focused on getting a sort of graphical grasp of the landscape.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - [Narrator] From local fights to family funerals, James recorded all facets of Devon life, but it was the small-scale farmers that fascinated him.

He admired their hard work, their stoicism, and their traditions.

He captured a way of life that, in the wake of industrial farming and the power of supermarkets, has almost completely disappeared.

(Stephen indistinctly speaks) - [Alf] Oh, yeah.

I think I've been here twice.

- I've gotten older.

Well, they got a new bottom door there.

(both chuckle) - Ah, yeah.

Well, they're the doors, apart from that bottom on there.

See?

It's pretty old.

- [Stephen] Oh, yeah.

The same.

I probably didn't recognize that's you, you know.

- [Alf] No.

Well, I hardly recognize myself.

- No.

No, I might have looked at him twice if the name hadn't been there.

(both chuckle) - [Stephen] Yeah.

You had your pens here, didn't you?

When I come here first- - [Alf] That's right.

Yes.

- You know, before the yard was concreted, you used to have the pens here, didn't you?

- Yeah.

- And sheared 'em in the barn here.

- That's right.

- Yeah.

You can see by this picture that I'm a lot faster shearer than Alf, and a lot tidier.

- Pardon?

(Stephen laughs) Pardon?

What was that you said?

(both laugh) - That's shearing going on in the corner of the field opposite us, and that, in fact, is Stephen Squire, Alf Pugsley's helper.

It's Archie's sheep and Archie's wonderful old shearing machine, which called a great deal of trouble.

It made a wonderful sort of farting noise all over the valley, but it was very much a social occasion.

It was always a blazing hot day, and then he passes by.

He would sort of stop and get involved and there'd be plenty of beer, Archie's homemade beer going around too.

The shearing machine was Archie's, so it might well be that Stephen would bring Alf Pugsley's sheep to be sheared, but in return, Alf Pugsley had a dipping pit, so Archie's sheep would go to Alf's to be dipped.

(sheep baaing) (birds chirping) (sheep continue baaing) (water burbling) (water continues burbling) (water continues burbling) - This one, to me, epitomizes George's caring attitude.

He would spend literally hours with little creatures and to get a lamb to suck.

James has just got that right.

You know, he's got his hand.

He's just pushing it, and the dog, Carlo, is waiting well back, you see.

He's not hustling them about at all.

Quite often, if you had a ewe that was reluctant to take its lamb to feed, the sight of a dog standing off and looking at it, it would be sufficient to make a do it.

So it was not uncommon to take a dog up fairly close to a ewe that was being difficult about lamb feeding, but, of course, it had to be a dog that could learn to stay back when it was told to.

Otherwise, if it rushed in, then the ewe would rush off and you'd be much worse off than you were when you started.

- Oh.

Jo.

That's here.

- Oh, yes.

That looks to me like that had a nick.

If you've got a nick and it bled, you see, on a sheep, and you just left it, the chances were that the flies would all gather on it and it might become infected, so you've dobbed it with coal tar.

- [Friend] Stockholm tar.

- [Jo] Stockholm tar.

Yeah.

Hence, don't spoil the sheep for a ha'porth of tar, because it was very little.

Oh, there's the sheep following me.

- [Friend] Well, that's up here, isn't it?

- [Jo] That's up here.

Yeah.

The biblical attitude towards shepherds and sheep is not the modern one, because nowadays, people think of sheep as things that run away and you have to round up with dogs, but in biblical times, the shepherd, as soon as the shepherd appeared, the sheep ran to him.

The shepherd would walk and the sheep would follow.

Mind you, I can do that as well, but it's no longer a common thing as it was.

- No.

(branches crackling) (cows mooing) (vehicle whirring) - So this is the field but just further down over, 'cause there's a house in that lot.

See?

That's the house.

It's down on the brow of the hill.

Well, you never see fields of cabbage, you know, flatpools or cabbages or whatever you'd like to call 'em anymore now.

You know, nobody bothers to grow anything like that anymore, 'cause, I mean, they're quite time-consuming, you know, 'cause you gotta plant them, then you gotta hold them, and then, you know, for the winter, you gotta cut 'em and quarter 'em for the animals.

I mean, it's all right, but you go out when it's raining, cutting 'em, you know, I mean, your hands get wet.

Your hands get cold, which is quite a good green crop, but just, you know, a lot of work to grow it.

The thing is I can't believe I got so much hair back then, but.

You know, he never said he was gonna take a photo of you.

You'd be just talking to him and then he'd say, "I'll let you get on with your work," and he'd sort of walk away, and he'd come back, you know, a few days, you know, a week or so later and say, "Well, look, this is a photo I took of you the other day."

Just used to get on and do it.

He was quite a good chap.

(wind howling) (birds chirping) (birds continue chirping) - [Stephen] Probably where he took this, right here.

Round about, isn't it?

So there's the trees, and there's a slight bend in the edge there, isn't there?

- Yeah.

- This should go along there.

There's a slight little bend there.

James, he'd come the day before, I know, and I must have said, "What are you even doing?

He said, "Oh, what time do you get down there in the morning?"

And I said, "Well, I start work half past seven.

By the time I walk down here, it'd be quarter to eight."

I got down here and he was here, and it was cold.

You know, you can see the frost, and I didn't have me lunch for two hours, so James must have stayed there from the time I went down and watched me do this, and then I sat down and had me lunch, and I presume he must have snapped this picture.

I was getting better, when it's done this edge.

I used to do pieces on me own and then he'd come in after and find fault with it.

(both laugh) That's how it worked.

I used to lay it in the morning and then he used to come after dinner, didn't he?

Once you'd done the work and say, "Well, this one should be on top of that one and this one should be on top of that one," and that's how you learn it.

You learn by your mistakes.

My father edging, grandfather and great grandfather, they was like the (indistinct) piecework, and, you know, that that was their job, edge laying.

They've gone back through the generations, but I'm afraid it stops with me now because I ain't got no son, and what what youngster wants to learn how to do it?

Because it's not done now.

(vehicle whirring) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - [Narrator] Towards the end of the '80s, traditional family farms ceased to be the engine of the local economy, giving way to new ideas and newer industries.

James' own fate mirrored the community he photographed, and in 1990, lack of funds forced the Beaford Center to withdraw their financial support of his work on the archive.

In the following years, James continued to photograph, exhibit, and publish new work.

Never tiring of photography, he worked right up until his death from lymphoma in 1999.

Ravilious' photographs are not only a historic document, but a carefully crafted vision of a centuries-old England most people had thought long gone.

In his lifetime, James received little acclaim.

Instead, he chose to focus and work close to home, passionately representing a world he loved, a world he knew only too well was rapidly disappearing.

- All right then.

Oh.

Jo's gone.

Bye, Chris.

- I've often said, I don't know if it really is just an easy cliche, but it's rather like doing an enormous tapestry in the medieval scene type, when they had various scenes of life.

You know what I mean?

And I felt, ah, there's a subject I haven't put in this, and it's rather important, somebody making rope for thatching or something.

Any little subject, somebody laying cobbles, or you know, little scenes, little cartouches that you might see in a cathedral carving.

I said, "Ah, I'll have that.

I'll add that to the picture."

- Breakfast.

(Olive indistinctly murmurs) - [James] So it's a sort of vast random tapestry, which really has no beginning and end.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (no audio)