To create this exhibition of the photographer, Fay Godwin’s work, we invited British landscape photographers from her period, along with writers, family members and close friends of Fay Godwin to select photographs from her entire range of landscape photography. The extended they wrote which appear alongside each print combine to provide a unique appraisal of a life-time's creative work

THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Fay Godwin's landscape photography, begun in the mid 1970s, coincided with an increasing public awareness of serious environmental issues facing Britain at that time, particularly pollution.

Fay Godwin - still from the film
‘Don’t Fence Me In’ - Malachite Films

Her passionate interest in walking, public access to and the neglect of the British landscape and the livelihoods of those who depended upon it, also ensured that her work was both relevant and well informed. She and her camera would become a witness to what was then, and still is, taking place.

From the 1980s and 1990s her photography was further animated by significant environmental purpose. Major exhibitions at London’s The Serpentine Gallery, The Photographers’ Gallery, The Barbican and elsewhere followed.

Exhibitions are transient, whereas, Fay Godwin’s preferred means of expression, the photographic book, particularly Land (1985), Our Forbidden Land (1990), The Edge of the Land (1995), The Secret Forest of Dean (1996) and Landmarks (2001), offered her far greater creative input and her photographic work a longevity.

The process behind this exhibition, the making of new prints from original negatives or one-off scans, from The British Library, for which we are hugely grateful, was a long and arduous one.

Peter Cattrell, who printed for Fay throughout the 1980s and 1990s as a young man, made these new prints.

This show is an opportunity to see a range of Fay Godwin’s landscape work only otherwise available to the specialist researcher.