ランドスケープ・フォトグラファーとして25年間以上のキャリアを誇り、多くの作品が美術館で所蔵されるイギリス人フォトグラファー、ジェム・ソーサム（Jem Southam）の作品集。イギリスにある数カ所の川をひと冬の間継続的に撮影し、微細に変容する情景をドキュメントした作品が収められている。作者がシリーズ制作途中で関連性を感じた、気象学の創立者でもある科学者Richard Hamblynのエッセイ付き。

“Winters, like ice ages, are Janus faced, for after the freeze comes thaw and flood, as water is returned to life and movement. Freeze, thaw, flood: the great climatic cycles that created the topography of the northern hemisphere, and which continue to shape the idea of winter that lies deep in our cultural imagination.” - Richard Hamblyn

In November 2010, after a photographic lull of half a year, Jem Southam took a photograph which became the first in this series, The River Winter and which spurred him to make one of the most concentrated bodies of work in his career. From late autumn through to the earliest signs of spring, along the banks of the river Exe in Devon, Southam chose locations and took photographs, returning at regular intervals. This pattern continued for the next five months with Southam documenting the subtle agencies of change transforming the landscape. By the end of January 2011 he realized this had become a new work, one that caught the effects of the Earth’s turn on film, one which followed the passage of a single winter. The shift in seasons is presented through a sequence of ten by eight colour contact prints, with which an essay by Richard Hamblyn explores how, since the last ice-age, winter has embedded itself into our cultural psyche.