‘Godwin shows through
her texts, her photographs and her actions how men write themselves over the
landscape and how they succeed in repelling boarders at the boundaries’
- Essay by John Fowles (Fay
Godwin, ‘Land’)
Fay Godwin is often celebrated as one of Britain’s greatest
landscape photographers, but her images often deal with wanting to sustain
ancient patterns of use or passage (Rambling in other words). With Fay Godwin’s
work, she is able to one hand, craft a beautiful and sublime landscape image
and with the other, tell a much more subtle but often darker story about man’s
influence on the landscapes around them.
If we take the image below as an example, we see that the sun
is shining the trees casting rays of light on the ground. A beautiful image which
some might say is very spiritual. But in the darkness of the trees, we are
presented with a gate barring us in (or out). My point is, is that even though
landscapes are portrayed as being ‘Free’ and ‘Open’, they are gradually
becoming more and more restricted and fenced off to us.
In many ways, we have ourselves to blame for this. The image and
quote below adequately sums up man’s arrogance towards nature and the
landscape.
‘If you were a farmer in the Forest of Dean and you
had your field of corn, and I wanted to start a mine in the middle of that
field of corn, there’s nothing in the world you could do to stop me. We can mine for coal anywhere
in the Forest of Dean except gardens, churchyards, and orchards’.
Donald Johns, Chairman of the Commoners’ Association
Basically,
we can do what we want in the landscape, but we can’t interfere where man has
been before. Even though it seen as a preserver of the landscape (among other
things), English Heritage also restricts us. Although in some ways, this is a
bit of a double edged sword for them, they seek to both protect the landscapes for us, and
protect it from ourselves.
Perhaps this sense or notion of 'Escapism' that we often seek, is not that of a physical one, but an escape for the mind instead.
(I meant to put this quote in my last post as I felt it sums up todays modern attitude towards both photography and landscapes as a whole: 'The photograph dates; makes past, inalienably now dead. ((This is why I dislike my piranha-fish tourist photographers, because they so often photograph in order not to have to look; as if having recorded for the future that they were there is more important than the being there')) - Essay by John Fowles, Fay Godwin 'Land')
Notes and second image from:
- 'The Secret Forest of Dean', Fay Godwin, with an introduction by Edna Healey
- 'A Dream of England - Landscape, Photography and the Tourists Imagination', John Taylor
- , Fay Godwin, 'Land', essay by John Fowles, and introduction by Ian Jeffery
First image from: http://www.djclark.com/godwin/landmarks/im08/index.html
Last Quote from: Fay Godwin, 'Land', essay by John Fowles, and introduction by Ian Jeffery
