The legacy of James Ravilious’s photographs
It is to Devon’s great good fortune that Ravilious chose to live, for all twenty-seven of his working years as a photographer, in the same area of North Devon, among small communities that he came to know so well. After leaving his job at Beaford he spent the last ten years of his life working on a freelance basis, taking on specific commissions and contributing to various publications and exhibitions. He selected 197 of his photographs for his own book, A Corner of England, which was published in 1995, fifteen years after his first collection had appeared in The Heart of the Country. (Ravilious, 1995) His standing as a master photographer gained the wider recognition it deserved in 1998 when Peter Hamilton, an Oxford academic who recognised the outstanding significance of his work, published An English Eye: The Photographs of James Ravilious. (Hamilton, 1998) This presented 113 of Ravilious’s finest photographs with an appraisal of his standing in the world of documentary photography. So struck was the well-known author, Alan Bennett, by Ravilious’s achievements as a ‘superb exponent of the Englishness of English Art’ that he was moved to write the Foreword to the book – even though he had to confess that ‘Except to pass through on the train I have never been to Devon’! Bennett went on to provide narration for James Ravilious: A World in Photographs, a thirty-minute film by the locally-based filmmaker Anson Hartford, first aired by the BBC in 2007.
The publication of Hamilton’s An English Eye followed on from a major Ravilious retrospective exhibition under the same title that the Royal Photographic Society showed in its Octagon Gallery in Bath in 1997. In the Society’s view Ravilious’s photographs represented " ... a unique body of work, unparalleled, at least in this country, for its scale and quality". The Society confirmed its high opinion by awarding him Honorary Life Membership. The Bath exhibition proved to be a landmark one which went on to tour a range of venues in the following years. Such has been its lasting impact that, in 2021, the Burton at Bideford gallery made the welcome decision to acquire the exhibition’s full set of 135 prints to add its permanent collections. This has secured a lasting home for this superb selection of Ravilious’s photographs in his native North Devon.14 Fittingly, in the same year, the Devon History Society unveiled one of its ‘blue plaques’ in Ravilious’s honour on the front of his family home in Chulmleigh and a new appreciation of his work was published by the Royal Photographic Society. (Wright, 2021)
Ravilious’s legacy as one of the country’s leading rural documentary photographers has been marked in other ways. In the summer before he died, Peter Hamilton, author of An English Eye, recorded a series of conversations with him, and six hours of these recordings are now accessible in the National Sound Archive as part of the Oral History of British Photography project.15 In 2000 the prestigious Leica Gallery in New York City selected some of Ravilious’s finest images to show alongside photographs by another leading documentary photographer, Humphrey Spender, in its The Landscape and People of England exhibition.
2000 also saw the publication of Peter Beacham’s fine Down the Deep Lanes, in which 93 of Ravilious’s photographs illustrated Beacham’s evocative essays on themes such as ‘lane’, ‘field’, ‘corrugated iron’ and ‘weather’. (Beacham, 2000) More recently, in 2017, James Ravilious A Life, a lovely biography written by Robin Ravilious, was published (Ravilious, 2017) as was James Hatt’s large-format personal selection of 78 photographs. (Hatt, 2017)
And what now of the Beaford Archive? Today, fifty-six years after the Dartington Hall Trustees created the Centre and thirty-three years after Ravilious left his job as its resident photographer, Beaford (the current name for the organisation that started life as the Beaford Centre) flourishes. It is now an independent arts charity, recognised as a National Portfolio Organisation by Arts Council England. Much has changed. The Orchard Theatre Company has long since gone and in recent years Beaford’s residential centre, Greenwarren House, has been sold. But those founding ambitions for providing high quality creative experiences and connecting with local communities remain as constant and inspiring as they were back in 1966. Beaford’s ongoing commitment to its unique Archive is such that it identifies it as one of the organisation’s three main programmes (the other two are Education and Events).16
The priority Beaford now gives to the Archive has been well demonstrated by its undertaking, in 2016-19, Hidden Histories, a highly successful £600,000 National Lottery Heritage Fund project to digitise the New Archive and publicise it more widely. The entire Archive collection of over 100,000 images has been cleaned and a new master record created. This features 78,977 of Ravilious’s negatives and a further 6,670 of Roger Deakins’. The project’s scanning of the New Archive images has led to digitised copies being posted for all to see on the Beaford Archive website. This has a fully searchable function for selecting individual images with the added attraction of people being able to purchase digital copies. The lottery project also catalogued the Old Archive images with a view to digitised versions of these being added to the website. In addition, it recorded and transcribed over 125 hours of interviews with local people connected with photographs in the Archive.17 And, following on from the Hidden Histories project, Beaford has published a new book on the North Devon Coast, illustrated with 73 photographs from the Old and New Archives. (Edgcombe, 2021)
Thanks to the continuing commitment of Beaford to the Archive, the photographs of James Ravilious can today be appreciated by an ever-widening audience. The fact that they continue to make such a lasting impression on people is due to a number of factors. Two in particular seem to stand out - the exceptional eye Ravilious possessed for picturing the moment and for composing such superb images; and the deep sense of belonging that he felt through living his life alongside those of the people his photographs reflect. His and Robin Ravilious’s In the Heart of the Country, published in 1980, was fondly dedicated to ‘the people of North Devon’ and on his gravestone in Iddesleigh churchyard James Ravilious is remembered as a ‘photographer who loved this countryside and its people’.