I have always admired Eric Ravilious’s depictions of planes and submarines, and his Betjemanesque scenes of monumental chalk figures on rolling downland, like the Uffington White Horse and Long Man of Wilmington. However, I only became interested in his son when he featured in an appropriately understated, Alan Bennett-narrated documentary called ‘James Ravilious: A World in Photographs’, which was first broadcast on BBC4 on 15 November 2007.

The programme described the younger Ravilious as one of the great unknowns of British photography. Over a period of two decades he took more than 80,000 photographs of the same small area of north Devon, one of the most comprehensive and poignant records of a bygone way of rural and farming life. Many of the images are subtly arresting, but the one that leapt out at me from the television screen three years ago was The Berry family raising the Jubilee flag, South Harepath, Beaford, Devon, 1977 (pictured above).

The photograph shows four, Wellington-booted figures putting up a large Union flag beside a field of ripening cereal under an unseasonably overcast sky. The photograph must have been taken on or before 7 June, in celebration of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, and Ravilious catches the moment as the makeshift flagpole swings into position, trailing the fluttering pennant in its wake.

Ravilious’s photograph of pastoral English patriotism elicits an immediate formal comparison with one of the most iconic and patriotic photographs of all time – the Joe Rosenthal image of six US servicemen raising the Stars and Stripes on the summit of Mount Suribachi on 23 February 1945, during the bloody battle for the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. The original version – the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication – was shot in landscape format, but the cropped, squarer reproduction has arguably become the most copied photograph of all time.

Given the ubiquity of Rosenthal’s photograph, it seems inconceivable that James Ravilious did not know of it or that his photograph is not a conscious homage, and there are many more instances of photographers either consciously or unconsciously restaging that famous instant on Iwo Jima; the best-known image of Mark Wallinger’s Oxymoron going up on the roof of a building in south London in 1996 comes straight to mind. The fact that the Rosenthal photograph depicts the restaging of an earlier, but less dramatic flag-raising scene on exactly the same spot, which was captured by staff sergeant Louis R. Lowery, makes the whole baton-passing narrative that much richer.

By the way, although the Berry family photograph is in Eastbourne, it hasn’t made it into the final display and is currently languishing in the Towner’s safe store. Ask to see it if you visit the exhibition. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

'Familiar Visions – Eric and James Ravilious: Father and Son' is at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, until 5 September.

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