Jamie Hawkesworth: The British Isles, 2007-2020
Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON once said: “A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos,” adding elsewhere that “it is an illusion that photos are made with the camera … they are made with the eye, heart and head.”

There is ample evidence here that Jamie Hawkesworth fully concurs as the work effectively displays much of the approach advocated by Cartier-Bresson. Particularly noticeable is the uniformly sublime composition, robust in appearance and mostly in close up which mesmerises.

The images are studiously organised by an immaculate balance of shapes and light to create a lingering sense of bareness, a frozen in time abandonment.

[[{"fid":"68669","view_mode":"inlineleft","fields":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Untitled - Photo: Huxley-Parlour","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Untitled - Photo: Huxley-Parlour","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"alt":"Untitled - Photo: Huxley-Parlour","class":"media-element file-inlineleft","data-delta":"1"}}]]Although the exhibition is titled The British Isles 2007-2020, the individual pieces are all Untitled, suggesting the details of place and time are incidental to the image itself. The meaning and/or intentions can only be guessed at.

There is a serene stillness of almost ascetic beauty, one that frees the imagination.

We are left alone to interpret, speculate on the sense of it all and the inherent visual poetry of what’s in front of us.

A dreamworld which emanates an intriguing calm and is made up of a fragmentary and accidental recollections.

The components are distinctly, if not uniquely, British.

A solitary bench at an anonymous seaside shelter, a shed wedged between a house and fence behind it, a landscape with a single sinusoidal edge separating the sea and sky from land, perhaps an invocation of British tradition of landscape painting from Richard Wilson via JMW Turner to James Naughton or Rosemary Burn.

There is a perceptible allusion to class in the “three discarded mattresses” used as makeshift trampoline on what appears to be a council housing estate. Elsewhere a 1950s pram sits absurdly in the middle of the road loaded with bags of candy floss.

The images seemingly devoid of a destiny or purpose and yet hypnotically beautiful in their surreal undertones.

Even human figures, when focused on, appear peripheral, no more than passing through the canvass — product of “an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity,” to borrow from Cartier-Bresson.

Hawkesworth’s photographs offer a stimulating interaction and invite a “Proustian” meditation on the remembrance of things past — an achievement worthy of note.

The British Isles, 2007-2020 continues until September 13 2024. Entry is free.