Fay Godwin; excellent Independent obit (photographer)
Hyfler/Rosner
Photographer fascinated by the landscape and ancient
roadways of Britain
02 June 2005
When the photographer Fay Godwin appeared as a guest on
Desert Island Discs in the spring of 2002, her choice of
music was a telling blend of the rambunctious (Bill Haley's
"Rock Around the Clock") and the elegiac (Benjamin Britten's
Suite for Cello).
Godwin's photography ranged from lyrical photographs of the
British landscape to penetrating portraits of some of the
UK's leading literary figures, including Ted Hughes, Angela
Carter and Philip Larkin. She transcended numerous cultural
barriers in her photographic work - she worked alongside
Hughes (on Remains of Elmet, 1979), the playwright Alan
Sillitoe (The Saxon Shore Way: from Gravesend to Rye, 1983)
and the novelist John Fowles (Land, 1985) on books about the
British landscape, and combined photography with political
activism when she became President of the Ramblers'
Association in 1987, producing a remarkable visual polemic,
Our Forbidden Land, in 1990.
Fay Godwin was passionate about photography, about the
students she taught at photographers' workshops, the
environment, the position of women in society, health issues
and her home on the bleak Romney marshes of Kent. A
conversation at a private view would quickly rise above the
small-talk of such occasions and become a powerful (and
usually one-sided) blast on the state of photography,
women's lives and the environment.
She was born Fay Simmonds in 1931 in Berlin, to Sidney
Simmonds, a British diplomat, and Stella MacLean, an
American artist. In the Fifties, she settled in London and,
in 1961, married Penguin Books' editor-in-chief Tony .
Through her husband, Fay was introduced to the lively London
literary scene, subject matter for many of her later
portraits. But Fay Godwin was a relative latecomer to
photography; self-taught, she honed her skills by
photographing her two young children, Nicholas and Jeremy.
When her marriage broke down in the Seventies (soon
afterwards Tony Godwin died), photography became a job
rather than a hobby as she produced photographs of authors
for book jackets and publishers' promotion.
Fay Godwin established herself as a defender of the craft,
as well as the art, of photography. Along with John Davies,
Thomas Joshua Cooper and John Blakemore, she became
internationally known as a maker of fine black-and-white
photographic prints which reflected a deep and mystical
regard for the landscape. She was one of the first British
independent photographers to break away from the confines of
the editorial and commercial worlds. Like so many
photographers who became prominent in the Seventies, she was
determined to fight for the right to follow her own
photographic convictions, to choose her own subject matter
and to work at her own speed.
Godwin was fascinated by the antiquity of the land, by the
traces which men and women had left behind them, manifested,
in her early projects, by ancient roadways across the
countryside. The Oldest Road: an exploration of the Ridgeway
appeared in 1975 and The Drovers' Roads of Wales in 1977.
But it was Remains of Elmet (1979), with photographs by
Godwin and poems by Ted Hughes, that brought her the acclaim
which established her as one of Europe's master
photographers. The photo historian Philip Stokes noted that
her
photographic studies of the landscape have a felicity which
flows from their rightness, rather from any gentling of her
view of the places photographed. Indeed, some convey a sense
of formidable, cold hardness. Many are located in the old,
used lands formed by the activities of predecessor tribes,
ranging from Bronze Age agriculturalists to early industrial
man. The marks of each on the earth are recorded by Fay
Godwin with such impartial completeness that the limitations
on information lie with the perceiver rather than the image.
In 1976, Godwin's photographs were included in the V&A's
exhibition The Land, selected by Bill Brandt in
collaboration with the museum's new curator of photographs,
Mark Haworth-Booth. For the leading members of the emerging
photo establishment, Godwin symbolised a new breed of
landscape photographer, combining a challenge to sentimental
pictorialism with a commitment to the rugged poetic
possibilities of landscape photography. Her black-and-white
fine prints repudiated the brightly coloured representations
of Britain which had become so familiar in the post-war
years. Here, they announced, is a landscape of mystery and
imagination, of wild places, hard rocks and cold water,
contradicting a view of Britain as a gentle idyll of
thatched cottages, limpid streams and peaceful meadows.
Godwin's countryside was violent and forbidding, a lonely
and magnificent place.
In Seventies Britain, fine photographic reproduction was
expensive, complex and often unobtainable. Although Godwin's
books promoted her photography to an audience far beyond the
small and marginalised UK photographic community, she was
determined to present her photographs as meticulously
produced artworks. From the beginning, she showed not at the
emerging photographic galleries opening in London and the
regions, but at the fine art Anthony Stokes Gallery in the
West End. As one of the first post-war British photographers
to be accepted by the British art world, she paved the way
for later generations of artist photographers, eager to
widen their opportunities beyond the photographic circuit.
By the mid-Eighties, Godwin was at the height of her
photographic powers. Her work was popular across a wide
range of audiences, from fine print collectors and
exhibition curators to a public intrigued by her sense of
adventure and her revelations of Britain's hidden landscape.
At the height of the growth of the heritage industry, where
the past was reconstructed to entertain the present, there
was something authentic about Godwin's view of history. She
recorded the small marks which mankind made on the land,
scratchings on a hardly permeable surface.
In 1984, the British Council toured a solo show of Godwin's
work across Europe, ensuring her international reputation,
and a year later, her exhibition Land opened at the
Serpentine Gallery. Land made Godwin famous, and the still
gravitas of these small black-and-white photographs hung on
the walls of the Serpentine's pavilion in the lush greenery
of Hyde Park was moving and monumental. Her photographs had
a stark simplicity which appealed to both press and public.
In her travels through Britain's wildest terrains, Godwin
became increasingly aware of how little of our countryside
we are allowed access to. She was appalled by the amount of
land held (and unused) by the Ministry of Defence, disturbed
by the extensive private estates which prevented the British
public from exploring its natural heritage. She was shocked
that the National Trust should demand a fee when she
photographed landscapes held in trust for the nation.
Increasingly radical, she became a central figure in the
Ramblers' Association, taking up its presidency in 1987.
For her next project, Our Forbidden Land, she searched for
locations which would illustrate the loss of public access
to the British countryside. She photographed notices,
crudely scrawled with directives to keep out, land littered
with detritus by the MoD, footpaths blocked and rights of
way obscured. She abandoned her usual collaboration and
wrote the text herself, producing a powerful and impassioned
plea for the right to roam. If this new work appealed less
to collectors, it could only enhance her reputation with a
British public increasingly interested in the natural
environment. Our Forbidden Land was published in 1990 and
won the first Green Book of the Year award; the Royal
Photographic Society organised an exhibition of prints from
the project and Godwin became an Honorary Fellow of the
Society.
Black-and-white landscape photography, with its concern for
fine printing, has a particular and dedicated following.
Godwin's sessions at the Duckspool Photographic Workshops in
Somerset proved to be a huge draw. It was surprising, then,
when she made an abrupt change in her photographic method.
She began to work in colour, making urban landscapes during
a residency at the National Museum of Photography, Film and
Television in Bradford and Glassworks & Secret Lives (1999),
a series of minutely detailed close-ups of natural forms.
Godwin was unable to find a publisher for this latest series
but, indefatigable as ever, she self-published, distributing
the book from a small local bookshop in her adopted town of
Rye.
To meet Fay Godwin in these later years was to encounter a
woman whose disappointment with the publishing and arts
establishment was clear and vocal. An invitation from the
Barbican Art Gallery in London to mount a retrospective
(Landmarks, 2001) was a compliment she undoubtedly had not
been expecting.
Godwin was a complex, surprising and often daunting
character. She battled with ill-health for much of her adult
life, yet walked hundreds of miles in wild country carrying
heavy photographic equipment. She was an independent woman
who succeeded at a time when photography was anything but a
woman's world. She expressed her anger towards the
establishment at the same time as supplying a connoisseurs'
market with exquisite fine prints. Many claims are made for
photography as an agent of change, and most are spurious.
But Fay Godwin's use of landscape photographs to change the
way we look at our world was genuinely, and powerfully,
radical.
Val Williams
Fay Simmonds, photographer: born Berlin 17 February 1931;
President, Ramblers' Association 1987-90, Life
Vice-President 1990; married 1961 Tony Godwin (two sons;
marriage dissolved); died Hastings, East Sussex 27 May 2005.