Fay Godwin: Land

During 2011 I visited the National Media Museum to see their exhibition of Fay Godwin's work entitled Land Revisited. I was so impressed by this work that I treated myself to the book of Fay Godwin's original 1985 exhibition, Land. I was also aware that she was the president of the Ramblers association from 1987 to 1990. In this role she campaigned heavily for greater public access to, and the conservation of, the British countryside. Being a keen mountain walker and lover of wildlife and the countryside, this also attracted me to her work. Colin Harding, curator of the exhibition said: " Fay Godwin was able to capture the differing moods and textures of the British Landscape with remarkable sensitivity and without sentimentality. These images established her reputation as one of Britain's finest landscape photographers."

This ability to capture the landscape without sentimentality is echoed by John Fowles in his essay at the beginning of Land. He begins his essay by expressing a dislike of photography as "everyman practises it" and even professes to dislike landscape. What he goes on to say, however, is that he dislikes photographs and paintings that sentimentalise our landscape. He says that over countless generations man has altered and despoiled the landscape around us and that if artists are to paint or photograph i,t it should be warts and all. In fact this is what Fay Godwin does, as Harding points out without sentimentality. Fowles also goes on to say that if photographers and artists perpetuate the myth that the landscape is always beautiful we encourage its continued destruction. I agree with this but I also feel that although she photographs the countryside warts and all she does so sensitively using lighting, viewpoint and perspective to make beautiful thought provoking images unlike some photographers who insist on photographing 'the warts and all' and making the resultant image, in my opinion, look ugly. I have to say that I am one of the breed who attempts to portray the beauty in the world and in wildlife and have to confess I may have cloned out the odd telegraph pole ( something to consider in my next course Advanced Digital). I admire Fay Godwin for her lack of sentimentality when taking photographs and still making beautiful images. At the end of his essay John Fowles concludes that "Even a totally wild landscape is humanized once it is photographed; but finding that point on the right road, the exact place and the exact time, where the humanizing is almost forgotten, so that the final print seems almost a natural object in itself, requires the greatest skill of all, and I believe it is a noble one.

Fay has that skill, and gives me a humbler kind of reassurance as well, that she can so frequently deny all those no doubt quirky personal doubts I have concerning photography, which are in turn a product of my general fear of the machine; of its passive inhumanity grown active inhumanity."

Very little of our landscape is truly natural, the wilder parts of our coastal scenery and the ancient Caledonian forests in Speyside being two exceptions. Virtually all of our countryside has been altered by the hand of man. As Ian Jeffrey points out in his introduction Fay Godwin has delighted in the juxtaposition of the wilder parts of our land with the more tamed. Occasionally this is stark as in the case of "Bunker and hawk, Dover Cliffs" or the old caravans and plough in "Kilchoan, Ardnamurchan Peninsular". At other times it is more subtle as in "Goynes, Pett Level" or "Boardale, Cumbria", where the man-managed farmland with cattle grazing is juxtaposed with the open fellside beyond the intake wall.

I love her images of standing stones, especially in "Black sky at Callanish, Lewis", and the single marker stone in "Marker stone, Old Harlech to London Road, Wales". The detail in intimate landscapes such as "Rocks and grasses, Cratcliffe Tor, Peak district" and "Chopped Tree, near Bradbourne, Derbyshire" are also inspirational and give me ideas for photographing One Acre for assignment 2. Her images of single trees in images such as "Tree with sheep, Alcomden, Yorkshire" and "Stream and birch, Glas Bheinn, Sutherland" put me in mind of some of the single trees I have photographed, although I hesitate to compare myself to Fay. The former tree image is also a reminder to work when the weather is inclement; apart from the tree and it's immediate surroundings the rest of the view is cloaked in dense cloud and mist. It reminds me of an image I took in Torridon a couple of years ago. In the morning I had photographed the peak of Slioch in excellent light. On another occasion, returning to our campsite along the same road in a torrential downpour, the rain suddenly cleared leaving a rainbow over Slioch but the mountain was cloaked in cloud and lost to view. " Large white cloud near Bilsington, Kent" whilst being John Fowles cherished favourite" is also a favourite of mine as it is reminiscent of the rolling Lincolnshire Wolds which I am using as my 'home patch' for assignment 1 and my portfolio.