"People simply do not tend to spend long periods of time taking in anything all in one place these days, so that you let on board, as it were, all your associations, past and present, all of your 'cultural geography.' I hope by looking at my pictures something in the viewer's chemical/electrical systems will get moved around a bit."

Such are the modest yet serious aspirations for 21 large-format, idyllic, yet also quietly disturbing photographs by Jem Southam, a distinguished English landscape photographer whose work has just gone on view at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). The show, titled Jem Southam: Upton Pyne, is the photographic chronicle of six years in the life of what is charmingly called an unprepossessing pond, not far from where the photographer lives in Exeter, England.

To say that Southam, who teaches his craft at the University of Plymouth in southern England, wants to show you the impact of natural and human forces on a single site would not do the photographer's long and layered process justice. A teacher, he is good at explaining. "Many of my students think," he said, "that to be a photographer, you go out and find something interesting and frame it and take lots of pictures of it, but no. That's not it at all.

"I'm not so much interested in documentation," he said during a tour of his work Tuesday, which fits nicely into two galleries on the second floor of the YCBA, "as I am in the picture process. Each picture is an experiment, if you will, a response to light in a kind of pictorial equilibrium at a given instant."

In the tradition of English landscape painters such as John Constable, and in the traipsing-among-the-daffodils tradition of William Wordsorth, this photographer is proudly old-fashioned. He lugs a large and heavy camera, often on his back, of the same kind that early Victorian photographers might have used more than 100 years ago.

And he gives himself rules: One, he uses only a single lens, which means he has to get close to his subject and location, and find just the right spot. Two, he shoots only one negative, so he has to wait until everything is absolutely right.

How does he know when it's right? You know, or you don't know, he answered.

Rule three: The pictures are all part of a narrative, but he labors so the story does not get in the way of the visual pleasure.

The story of Upton Pyne that grabbed Southam by the collar and wouldn't let him go for six years is this: Quite by accident he stumbled on a little pond near his home. It was a mess, filthy, odiferous, suffering from nearby mining and from neglect. What kept him coming back and looking was a fortuitous meeting with a man who had decided to turn the pond, small but deep, into a kind of idyllic spot. The pond's announced caretaker, however, was bumbling. He made a mess of things. He apparently was very distracted because, in Southam's wry words, "the bloke up the road had run off with the pond-caretaker's wife and he was using the fixing of the pond to try to fix up his life. It didn't work. He was quite inept, and the pond was a mess, after three years."

However, as if by the hand of Nature, the pond came back, said Southam. Herons and kingfishers returned, where in the past there had been mainly junk and traces of manganese. In the following three years, which Southam also chronicled, the natural aspect of the pond was turned into a kind of contemporary suburban pondscape, with a children's play set and other built-along-sides, added by two competent pond caretakers with more skill, yet somehow fewer of the demons that seemed to interest Southam in the first go-round.

YCBA director, Amy Meyers, noted that in several of the photographs, the children's play set, an innocent addition, seemed to sit precariously beside the pond, which in this context appeared threatening.

"Oh, it is," Southam enthusiastically concurred. "That's 30-feet deep. No fence. A person could drown there. I always like the brutish danger of things to punctuate the pastoral and the idyllic. It's just there."

He went on to explain that had it not been for the field of cultural geography, the exploration of the all the connections --- societal, historical, personal, received, all of it - when one contemplates a setting or a work of art, he might have lost interest in photography years ago. "Cultural geographers use this approach to analyze other peoples' work," he said. "I take all that to make my own work."

Southam keeps perhaps a dozen projects going at once, until one clicks, one where a narrative grabs him and then he runs with it wherever it may take him. The picture-making process is layered, he said. First, there's the taking of the picture, being in the immediate, one-chance psychological moment. Then there's the making of the print (he shoots on old-fashioned 10-by-8-inch plates and enlarges so all the prints in the show are 27 by 34). Then there's putting the narrative together in a book or for an exhibition. Finally, there's the hanging of it. Those steps are all different. Until the current show Southam said he had never seen so many -- there are 21 of the total of 41 Upton Pyne images in the YCBA exhibition -- all in one place.

"It's like a novel, but contingencies and fate take me where I'm going." This exhibition has been curated by the YCBA' Scott Wilcox, the curator of prints and drawings, and is co-organized with the Herbert E. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. It runs through Dec. 30. The YCBA is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 to 5, and Sunday 12 to 5. For lunchtime lectures, family, and other programs around Jem Southam: Upton Pyne, the contact is: yale.edu/ycba

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