Early in the morning, before breakfast and the start of the workday, photographer Jem Southam takes to the countryside of southwest England - of Bristol, Cornwall, Dorset, Devon, and Somerset - with camera in hand. His photographs of the hills and valleys, farms and smallholdings, coasts and cliffs, tinning streams and dew ponds, chart the subtle evolution of this place, transformed not only by natural geological processes but by human intervention over centuries. Created as series over long periods of time, these ostensibly topographic and descriptive photographs derive great power from an underlying allegorical language, which draws on and engages our collective imagination.<BR>Landscape Stories, the first comprehensive collection of Southam's work, culls from three completed series, The Pond at Upton Pyne, The Red River, and Rockfalls, Rivermouths, and Ponds. It also presents several smaller groups of pictures, from series still in the making and never before published. Southam's own brief narratives about the places and processes he captures, together with essays by esteemed photo historians Gerry Badger and Andy Grundberg, create a rich context for contemplating these remarkable landscape stories.