Over the last few months I’ve been fascinated by the career of Fay Godwin, who was one of the great photographers of British landscapes from the 1970s to the end of her life in 2005.

I bought her Ridgeway and Glassworks & Secret Lives books and borrowed her Land series and Remains of Elmet from the library. There’s plenty of source material on the web too, with a long audio interview at the British Library, together with a large collection of prints. Her appearances on the South Bank Show and Desert Island Discs can also be found online.

Fay Godwin is best known for her black and white photographs of rural places, but she wasn’t interested in pristine wilderness. She usually showed evidence of human presence, often remote farms, standing stones, or just a sign put up to assert private ownership. Sometimes she found wrecks of cars and ships.

She used square medium format film, which immediately gives her pictures a very different kind of composition from most landscape images; more photographic in character than following conventions of painting. She rebelled against the picturesque tradition and pursued an unsentimental and rigorous approach of her own; hard-edged and dark, isolated and elemental.

Her viewpoint was usually stepped back, to allow an expanse of foreground for the viewer to approach her subject. She emphasised distance and remoteness very effectively, but sometimes you wish she’d get in closer. Her photo of a prayer net in Iona is a rare domestic interior.

She often collaborated on books with writers, but insisted her contribution be seen on equal terms. She hated being thought of as merely an illustrator of someone else’s work. The Remains of Elmet, with Ted Hughes, is a perfect example of photography and poetry working together.

Godwin excelled at the technical aspects of photography and made fine prints in the traditional way, but when digital technology came along she cleared out her darkroom to make way for new possibilities.

Her breaking with traditions in art went hand in hand with politics. As an environmental campaigner Godwin used photography to visualise debates on access to land as a rambler and damage to the natural world by construction work. She was an artist unafraid to make the most of her ability to take the great and powerful to task.

Glassworks & Secret Lives was a late departure for Fay Godwin, self-published in 1998. It came before the boom in photobook self-publishing, so Godwin felt this was something she had to do herself because no publisher would take it. They weren’t interested because it was so different from the work she was best known for.

This body of work is in colour and somewhat abstract. It’s small scale, close-in and local. At this time of her life she could no longer walk long distances, so she stayed close to home and found more intimate subjects. The Glassworks project dates from 1989-95 and Secret Lives, 1994-99.

It’s a nice, small book with a standard layout, one photo to a page; nothing innovative or clever about it. Compared with self-published photobooks of today it looks like not enough design effort has been put in, but its straightforwardness comes as a relief too, and it’s fitting with Godwin’s forthright personality. She just wanted to show her pictures.

In his introduction, Ian Jeffrey discusses finding alternative ways with landscape. Here Godwin opts for the sensuous.

These are found still lives, assemblages of debris, the disused leftovers of industry. Discarded and lying around. Layers of glass, foliage, fabric and netting create diffuse, abstract and dreamlike effects. Colours are muted, soft and autumnal. Everything is close, but at one remove, untouchable, as though seen from behind a semi-opaque screen.

Ian Jeffrey sees this as a vision of an earth that has outlived the human era. A world under threat, drained of colour, broken and confused. It’s an abandoned place, where ruins are reclaimed and overwritten by nature.

Because there’s no horizon in these images they appear as ambiguous spaces where it’s hard to judge scale and spatial relationships. There’s no perspective. Another interesting idea from Ian Jeffrey’s introduction is about how the usual upright standpoint in photography serves to assert human interests and priority. We are in an elevated postition, surveying and commanding the scene. When you leave the horizon out of an image perhaps that returns us to a primitive and pre-rational view of the world. We’re closer to the ground, reading its marks, following its tracks and traces.

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Posts tagged with photobook

Čista Zona - Sergej Vutuc

I do not want to disappear silently into the night by Katrien De Blauwer

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Nordic Songs & Fairytales

Glassworks & Secret Lives by Fay Godwin

Columbia Road

Alluring Hell

Saul Leiter