Fay Godwin – Land Revisited

On Saturday The Guardian in its ‘Review’ section published an appreciation by Margaret Drabble of the work of landscape photographer Fay Godwin – and you can read it online too. It’s better online, as the single image which accompanies it, although smaller there, stands out much better on the screen than in the muted greys of newsprint, which also splits it unfortunately across the two pages of the spread.

It is of course a well-crafted piece, presenting much of the relevant information, but rather lacking so far as Fay’s relationship to the medium is concerned, and it contains at least one statement that I am fairly certain would have enraged her, when Drabble talks of her 1983 The Saxon Shoreway as an example of her “author-led publications“.  Indeed perhaps her only truly author-led work was her collaboration with Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet (1979) which was one of her first and I think possibly her weakest works as a photographer. Drabble correctly describes this as a creative partnership between poet and photographer, but despite some fine images it is perhaps the only of her works in which she is arguably the junior partner.

The rules and attitudes of the publishing companies, which resulted in her early works – books which she had conceived,  and photographed, being listed under the names of the literary figures whose contribution other than their name was often rather minor (I can’t vouch for the actual words she used, and the phrase ‘I did everything but wipe his sodding arse’ that comes to my mind about one of them may well just be my own précis of her argument) with her simply as an illustrator remained a continual irritation to her, even after she gained the clout to get books such as Land (1985) under her own name.

I first met Fay at Paul Hill‘s cottage in Derbyshire, the Photographers Place in Bradbourne, where we had both gone to learn at the feet of Raymond Moore. She was then in her mid-forties and just becoming well-known in photographic circles as a landscape photographer. It was at the same place and probably the same time that I also met Roger Taylor who talks about her work  on the short video about the show, Land Revisited which continues at the National Media Museum in Bradford until 27 March 2011.

I never became a close friend, but we met occasionally at events and openings, and in many ways spoke the same language. Whenever we found ourselves together at a show we always took a tour around together, sharing our opinions (often unprintable) and enthusiasms about the work on the wall. We shared too some of the same influences – people like Moore and Bill Brandt who worked in this country, Paul Strand, and although we took it rather differently, the earlier US landscape tradition.

Brandt’s book ‘Literary Britain‘ was I think in many ways a fairly direct forerunner of much of her approach to landscape, and I think like me she would have preferred the perhaps rather gloomy 1951 original to the later more contrasty revision.

One of the texts on the National Media Museum site is by Fay, and in the previously unpublished ‘How Land Came About‘ her voice comes through very clearly, with a real sense of the frustrations she faced and felt in pursuing her work in an environment where photography was not valued by the UK publishing and media industries.  (Nothing has changed there!) There is also an interview with Fay from 2002 on the UK Landscape site.

Fay was fortunate in 1978 to receive a major award from the English Arts Council to photograph the British landscape during the brief period when they supported photographers rather than institutions. Work she produced from this provided the bulk of her show and book ‘Land’ (1985), perhaps the best of her books. The 2001 retrospective book Landmarks covers a wider range of her work as you can see her web site.

Fay died in May 2005, aged 74 (her website was updated to include some of the obituaries) and in 2008 “the entire contents of Godwin’s studio: negatives, contact sheets and exhibition prints (around 11,000 prints in total), as well as correspondence with some of her sitters including Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Doris Lessing” was accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by the government and is held by the British Library. You can see 128 of her images on their site.

I’ve written about her and her work on various occasions, most recently in a post here, Copying, Co-Incidence or Cliché? where both she and I made almost identical images of a sleepy stone lion at Chatsworth. Along the bottom strip of images on the page I link to containing her picture are thumbnails of a number of her finest images, and there are several others that are similar to pictures I’ve made and a couple that – at a glance – could be by Brandt. It doesn’t in any way detract from here as a photographer that this is so, but it does root her firmly in a tradition that she would have been happy to affirm, even if it seems not to have occurred to Margaret Drabble.

This is not a photo by Fay Godwin! Sleepy Lion, Chatsworth  © Peter Marshall, 1980