Photobook Review: Sorrow by Dawn Rodgers

Sorrow is a story of grief. Consisting of bare text drawn from the death certificate of her brother who died in 1993, along with old images from the family album, it is a book where emotion is found in the contemporary landscapes Rodgers photographs.

Central to the book is the idea of thin places, the places where the gap between life and death narrows, places that have an age to them, a mystery to them, where all is not quite as it seems.

In Sorrow, these thin places are situated in Dorset, a county dotted with ancient hillforts, hollow ways, and stone monuments that date back thousands of years.

It’s an unusual mix, one that I confess an interest in as Dawn is a former student of mine, a mix that finds expression in a book that combines both the weight of personal grief, of words and emotions that have not been fully resolved in the 30 years since his death.

‘This book is a quest,’ writes Rodgers in her project statement, ‘a story, my journey looking through the thin space searching for evidence of his physical presence in the uncanny and eerie landscapes of Dorset. It is here I continue to search the forgotten spaces, empty and barren, haunted, hoping to find a fleeting glimpse of him in the hills and hollow ways.’

So there is a gravity in the book, but there is also a lightness. As with Rules for Fighting by Paola Jiménez Quispe, the book is contained in the form of an exercise book, a reproduction of her brother’s exercise book from his childhood. It comes complete with smudges and inkblots, his traces transported across time to the present day, the exercise book element always present, her brother’s childhood always present.

The text is minimal, consisting of pared down entries extracted from her brother’s death certificate printed directly onto the exercise book pages. Certified copy of an entry, Entry No. 248, QBDAC 71597 reads the first page.

And then we have empty lined pages of the exercise book before a landscape, a Dorset landscape of a path strewn with vegetal litter winding through a desolate mesh of brush and bramble.

More text comes on the next page; Part 1. Date and place of death, and then a square picture of a boy standing in a doorway. Beneath the picture is more text; 11 November -1993. Dead on arrival at Weymouth and District Hospital, Weymouth, Dorset.

There are images of rockfaces and sea, a tumult of foam against a grey sea bed, and more text. We learn her brother’s name. It’s Geoffrey Alan Rodgers, and there are more family pictures, with Dawn and their mother, standing together on a street, playing on a sand dune.

And amidst it all there are the strange desolate landscapes, with scratched stones, volcanic looking pathways, and cracks and crevices and pathways that take you into different worlds.

Fragments of information are given throughout the book. We find where he was born, what he did for a living. And then the cause of death. Injury to the heart.

And that’s almost it apart from the inscription on the back of one of the photographs; our Geoff it reads.

Sorrow is a restrained book, its succinctness proving that the power of words lies not in how many you use, but in economy and a confidence in what they can do, the bureaucratic tone becoming more fluid, eliding into the family pictures, into the crevices of the landscapes that Rodgers photographs, landscapes that carry the weight of her sorrow, landscapes that become inhabited by the presence of her mourned brother.

The book ends with an extract from the Virginia Woolf novel, The Waves.

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness.
I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness.
I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body

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Sorrow by Dawn Rodgers

Self-published
Edition of 150 copies

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Dawn Rodgers is a visual artist based in Berkshire. Her practice is centered around the loss of her brother and the paradoxical feelings that grief leaves and through the photographic work she has endeavored to visualise these feelings with photography, itself a paradoxical medium which simultaneously records reality, whilst deconstructing and reassembling it. She is currently a teacher and Head of Photography at Bradfield College in Berkshire.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His next online courses begin in September, 2024. More information here. Follow him on Instagram