“It is difficult to escape the feeling that we are all “insiders” now, alarmingly aware of the finiteness of the natural resources we used to take for granted as Nature’s endless bounty. We don’t have to imagine, with the aid of alluring images of Arcadian natural simplicity, what it must have been like to live in Nature; we are all too aware of our dependency on Nature now. More crucially still, we feel Nature’s dependency on us”¹.

I have been writing my Illustrated Proposal recently and the underlying theme of this is the conflict between the land itself and the exploitation of that land by human activity. I am interested in how that exploitation shapes the land, and creates a constant tension between “rural” and “urban”, particularly where the two collide, on the Edgelands². I am interested in this from an environmental standpoint, the fragile (im)balance that increasingly weighs towards over exploitation, but also from a photographic standpoint, how the land is represented by different photographers and why they choose the approaches in their work that they do.

As part of this I have starting looking again in more depth at a number of late 20^th century “landscape” photographers, for example, Fay Godwin, Helen Seers, Robert Adams and Don McCullin.

Fay Godwin was a passionate campaigner for open access to the land and was President of the Rambler’s association from 1987 to 1990. Her passion for landscape grew from her love of walking and many of her images evoke the quintessential beauty of the countryside.

Fay Godwin, Heptonstall © Collections/Fay Godwin/BL

But she also campaigned for better access to the countryside for everyone and her book “Our Forbidden Land”³ explores her passion for the environment and the damage so easily inflicted on it. What I like most about her work is how she captures the essence of what she sees with a striking directness of purpose. Nothing in the image is wasted. In her obituary in the Times of 31^st May 2005, she was quoted as saying “I’ve been called a Romantic photographer and I hate it. It sounds slushy and my work is not slushy. I’m a documentary photographer, my work is about reality, but that shouldn’t mean I can’t be creative”⁴.

She also has some disparaging things to say about the picturesque genre of art, which is certainly not how one would describe her own work. “The problem for me about these picturesque pictures, which proliferate all over the place, is that they are a very soft, warm blanket of sentiment, which covers everybody’s idea about the countryside….It idealizes the country in a very unreal way”⁵.

Whilst Fay Godwin is always known as a “Landscape” photographer and worked almost entirely in black and white, Helen Sear is known for the great diversity of her work and the colourful visualisation of the natural world, as she explores themes of “vision, touch and re-presentation of the nature of experience”⁶. What I enjoy most about her work is the inventiveness of her methodologies and the use of different media (not just straight forward photographic images) to explore the world. For example, in her series “Beyond the View”⁷, she overlays portraits and landscapes with other images and textures from nature, creating mysterious and often haunting images of women hidden in the landscape.  

I find these images inspirational in thinking about how I want to portray the landscape, challenging me as a photographer to think much harder about how images work, how to engage an audience that is often tired of clichéd images of traditional picturesque scenes, and how to find an original voice to challenge complacency in the face of environmental damage and waste.

Notes

1. Andrews, M. (1999) Landscape and Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp22.
2. Alexander, J.A.P.  (2015) Perspectives in Place: Theory and Practice in Landscape Photography. London: Bloomsbury, pp83. Also, Farley, P and Symmons Roberts, M. (2011) Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness
3. Godwin, F. (1990). Our Forbidden Land. London: Jonathan Cape.
4. The Times, Obituary, 31^st May 2005. From the website www.faygodwin.com.
5. Godwin, F. Southbank Show. Produced and directed by Hilary Chadwick, London Weekend Television, 1986.
6. www.klompching.com/helen-sear-home
7. Sear, H. (2008) Beyond the View. www.helensear.com/portfolio/beyond-the-view/