The view from across the water

Jem Southam's photos track the flow of time at an English pond

Jem Southam's "July 1996" is the first in a series of photographs that he took chronicling the changes at a pond in Upton Pyne, England.

WELLESLEY - "Jem Southam: Upton Pyne" is a pond-sized show (there are just 21 photographs) about an an English pond. Its concerns are oceanic, though: the struggle - or is it alliance? - between timelessness and time.

Southam is an English landscape photographer who uses an 8-by-10-inch view camera. It produces a large image of great clarity. (View cameras are also cumbersome and require long exposure times, which means few photographers use one.) From 1996 to 2001, Southam photographed at regular intervals a waste pond in the village of Upton Pyne, near where he lives, in rural Devon.

Locally known as the Black Pit, the pond began as part of an 18th-century manganese mine. After the mine was abandoned, in the 19th century, the site began to fill with rainwater and runoff and became a local dumping ground.

The scene sounds grim: Black Pit, abandoned mine, dumping ground. This is southwestern England, though, with its unconquerable greenery. The pond, in fact, is in the midst of Upton Pyne, and a whitewashed house overlooks it. It's clear that people don't give it a wide berth. Even the trash they leave looks rather sedate. Enhancing that effect is the soft, indirect light Southam relied on. He shot in early morning or late afternoon - not quite magic hour, but close enough. So the appearance of the site is surprisingly picturesque. (Well, usually: In a picture from December 2001 the pond surface has a thick, brown sheen with the drained look of tainted chocolate.)

This relative picturesqueness meant Southam could ignore ecological and social concerns to concentrate on his real interest here: incremental change, both natural and manmade. He had photographed the pond before, but the inspiration for recording it over time was quite specific. Cycling by one day, he noticed a man working on the pond's margins. He learned that the man, who lived in the house by the pond, had decided to try and clean it up. As it happened, the man would later abandon the task - it would, in turn, be taken up by another resident - but Southam had his project.

Southam has an unemphatic (one is tempted to say English) eye. This is very much to the good, as his pictures are big - 24 inches by 37 inches - and in color, thus adding a further density of detail to them. In the first picture, for instance, from July 1996, the pond shares the frame with a beached rowboat, a truck parked in the background, and a pair of rather nonchalant chickens in the foreground. Confident in the inherent interest of his subject, Southam feels no need to thrust specific elements at us. There's a leisureliness to these images that makes them all the easier to take in and ponder.

It isn't so much the pond one ponders as the way it reflects (or not) the passage of time. But for the occasional glimpse of a motor vehicle or television antenna, we could be looking at a scene from Thomas Hardy's Wessex more than a century ago. The title of each photograph is the month and year Southam took it - not the day, though; that would be too urgent. Further enhancing the unhurried, timeless quality of the Upton Pyne pictures is the nature of the view camera. It records slowly, which encourages us to see slowly, too.

Yet alteration, at however leisurely a pace, does come. The seasons, much more than the removal of refuse or filtering of the pond, see to that. Southam's approach may be visually austere, but that complements the fecundity of the setting. Even in winter, there is much green to be seen; and at its most polluted the pond never ceases to be a rich tangle of root and branch. It's in the unfurling of leaves and falling of branches that we find revealed most clearly the unfurling and falling of time.

Four concluding photographs step back to give a sense of Upton Pyne's agricultural surroundings. We see farm equipment and plowed fields, puddles and much mud. There's also a hand-written sign off to the side in the two last photographs that reads "Slow Down Please." It nicely sums up a show to savor.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.