Photographer has personal vision

Press, 13 March 1987, Page 15

Photographer has personal vision

A rotting car sinking into a river, a pile of discarded tyres, rocks scattered on a hillside, barbed wire ... these are not the traditional images of the picturesque, but it is subjects like these that have helped make Fay Godwin one of the most popular and admired landscaped photographers in the world.

The "South Bank Show,” on One at 9.00 tonight, travels with Fay Godwin through the Scottish Highlands, Derbyshire and the Kent Coast, charting her personal vision of the British countryside ... a vision that finds beauty not only in the grandeur of mountains and mists but also in the bleak landscape surrounding a nuclear power station.

No photographer has given such a comprehensive portrait of rural Britain in the late twentieth century, and this film shows how Godwin’s photographs reflect the influence of centuries of British landscape painting.

It also tells a remarkable personal story. A housewife and mother, Godwin did not touch a camera until she was in her mid-thirties, when she began taking holiday snaps of her children. The camera became a passion, but she did not become a professional photographer until her marriage broke up, when she had to balance commercial work and portraits with raising her two sons. She became known for her studies of literary figures, and a retrospective show of these portraits is being

held in London this autumn. Godwin began photographing rural Britain in the mid-seventies at the suggestion of the poet Ted Hughes, who prompted her to visit the decaying industrial landscape of Yorkshire’s Calder Valley

... the first in a series of walking tours in which she found beauty in neglected and disregarded areas of the countryside.

These photographs and Hughes’s poems eventually were published as the book “Remains of Elmet.” Godwin’s other collabora-

tions have included “The Saxon Shore Way” with Alan Sillitoe. "The Whisky Roads Of Scotland” with Derek Cooper, “Romney Marsh,” with Richard Ingrams, “Islands” with John Fowles, and her latest work “The Forest of Dean” with Edna Healey. A collection of her best photographs was published under the title “Land.” We see a number of her classic photographs, plus some taken specifically for the programme, which is a comprehensive portrait of her life and work.