The Harbour gathers Jem Southam's previously unpublished early body of work on the Floating Harbour of Bristol, made over a five-year period from 1977 to the early 1980s while Southam was working at the Arnolfini gallery. Looking out one day from his office window in 1978 he watched the demolition of an old quayside warehouse and went over with his camera; that visit became a long, returning project on the docks. At the time the central Bristol dockland area—so named because the lock gates at each end kept it at a constant water level, separate from the tidal river beyond—was empty, decaying, scarcely visited beyond the fledgling museum of Brunel's SS Great Britain. Working mostly on Sunday mornings with a 5x4 MPP folding-bed camera and tripod, Southam moved around the derelict sites largely unimpeded, recording the vistas. Over five years he made more than a thousand images. This first major black-and-white project is also the body of work that opened the way to all his later landscape books; The Harbour brings the long-unseen pictures into book form for the first time.