Zemni Photography Blog

Tag: Northern England

  • Fay Godwin

    Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 – 27 May 2005) was a British photographer known for her black-and-white landscapes of the British countryside and coast. Official website British Library archive:  including approximately 11,000 exhibition prints, the entire contents of her studio, and correspondence with some of her subjects. Google images  detailed overview of her work from her books still to be done

    Landscape

      Rebecca the Lurcher (1973) The Oldest Road: An Exploration of the Ridgeway (1975), co-authored with J.R.L. Anderson—working mainly in the landscape tradition she aimed to communicate the sense of ecological crisis present in late 1970s and 1980s England. Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence (1979, with Ted Hughes). Hughes called the 1994 Elmet the “definitive” edition. Godwin also said, in a 2001 interview, that this was the book she would like to be most remembered for. Land (1985, with John Fowles and designed by Ken Garland) described by The Guardian art critic Ian Jeffrey  the “book for which she will be most remembered”. What sets Land apart is the care that Fay gave to the combining and sequencing of its pictures. Working with contact prints on a board, she put together a picture of Britain as ancient terrain—stony, windswept and generally worn down by the elements….[a work] in the neo-romantic tradition…[that] gives an oddly desolate account of Britain, as if reporting on a long abandoned country.  A retrospective book, Landmarks, was published by Dewi Lewis in 2002. Glassworks & Secret Lives (1999) She also began taking close-ups of natural forms. A major exhibition of that work was toured by Warwick Arts Centre from 1995 to 1997  Glassworks & Secret Lives (ISBN 0953454517) is Godwin’s self-published  small book of that work  which was distributed from a small local bookshop in her adopted hometown of Hastings in East Sussex. Our Forbidden Land
     Portraiture
    Through her husband, Godwin was introduced to the London literary scene. She produced portraits of dozens of well-known writers, photographing almost every significant literary figure in 1970s and 1980s England, as well as numerous visiting foreign authors. Her subjects, typically photographed in the sitters’ own homes, included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Günter Grass, Ted Hughes, Clive James, Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien, Anthony Powell, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, and Tom Stoppard.
    Life
    1931 Born Berlin, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist, Stella MacLean. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1961 married publisher Tony Godwin; the couple had two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas.   1966 Became interested in photography through photographing her young children. No training. “ My way into photography was through family snaps in the mid-1960s. I had no formal training, but after the snaps came portraits, reportage, and finally, through my love of walking, landscape photography, all in black and white. A Fellowship with the National Museum of Photography in Bradford led to urban landscape in colour, and very personal close-up work in colour has followed. ” —Fay Godwin, ca. 2000,   1975 Publication of first co-author book, The Oldest Road, with writer J.R.L. Anderson. Exhibitions from the series toured nationally. 1978 Recipient of major award from Arts Council of Great Britain to continue landscape work in British Isles, much of which is included in Land. 1984 Start of British Councils overseas tour of Landscape Photographs. 1985 Publication of Land. Major exhibition of Land at the Serpentine Gallery, London. 1986 South Bank Show their first full-length documentary to feature a photographer. 1986/7 Fellow at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford. 1987/90 President of the Ramblers’ Association, UK. Then life vice president. “long-running right-to-roam campaign was turned up to the full-strength pressure which ultimately resulted in the access provisions enshrined in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 and the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003.” 1990 Awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. 1990 six week lecture and workshop tour of New Zealand. In the 1990s she was offered a Fellowship at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (now the National Media Museum) in Bradford, which pushed her work in the direction of colour and urban documentary.   Major retrospective at the Barbican Centre in London 2001, with accompanying publication, Landmarks. Honorary Doctotorate of Arts at De Montfort University, 2002. Godwin was less active in her final years; in a December 2004 interview for Practical Photography, she blamed “the NHS. They ruined my life by using some drugs with adverse affects that wrecked my heart. The result is that I haven’t the energy to walk very far.”   Died, May 2005 aged 74. No Man’s Land – Fay Godwin’s last interview, from ePHOTOzine.com   Fay Godwin is a familiar name in British landscape photography, celebrated for her critical approach to the landscape genre (see Part Three) and for being one of the most successful female photographers of the twentieth century. Like Pollard, Godwin had – albeit in a very different way – a strained relationship with the British landscape. Whilst she was clearly quite at home trekking around the more remote parts of the countryside (e.g. the Lake District, Forest of Dean), throughout the 1970s and 80s Godwin became increasingly concerned with the degree to which access to the land was becoming restricted. She allied herself with the Ramblers Association, becoming president in 1987. Fences, wire and cautionary signposts (some polite and others less so) are familiar motifs within Godwin’s photographs. Her image Stonehenge Summer Solstice (1988), in which the stones are obscured by barbed wire more typical of a military base than a heritage site, is a visual expression of the frustration she felt at being unable to gain access to the site to make a more considered set of images than a few snapshots (see Taylor, 1994, pp.276–83). Like John Davies and others, Godwin paid careful attention to light conditions and ordered her compositions along traditional, pictorial conventions, which is one of the reasons why her photographs have remained so appealing. This stealth tactic allows the viewer to be taken in by the aesthetics of the image; once the viewer is engaged, Godwin is able to pose more challenging questions about the landscape. Listen to Fay Godwin on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2002. ———————————————

    !! to update with my own detailed thoughts on Land, The Edge of the Land and Our Forbidden Land as I critique my own work in Assignment 5.

    Publications

    Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 – 27 May 2005) was a British photographer known for her black-and-white landscapes of the British countryside and coast. Her approach was very intuitive and felt that images where she had thought too deeply about composition and meaning had less ‘visceral’ power as a response to what she was seeing.

    She was self-taught and her obsession with photography started with family photos and producing photo albums for neighbours. produced portraits and documentary work of factory workers. Much of the emotional charge of her images she attributes to difficulties in her personal life: traumatic marriage break-up, cancer and struggles to support her children that led her to throw herself into her work. She produced portraits of writers and also documentary work on factory workers. But it is for her landscape photography that she is best known.

    Justin Jones overview of her work in the context of her life and politics . Discusses many of her iconic photographs. And what he sees as some of the gender dimensions of her work – though I feel some of these distinctions may be a bit exaggerated and not sure how far Fay herself would see her work in this way.

    Landscape photography and activism

    She was a very vocal critic of the ‘picturesque’ and her photographs aim to capture landscapes as they really are with all their historical, social and political complexity.

    “I am wary of picturesque pictures. I get satiated with looking at postcards in local newsagents and at the picture books that are on sale, many of which don’t bear any relation to my own experience of the place… 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 idealises the country in a very unreal way.”
    (Fay Godwin 1986 South Bank Show Produced and directed by Hilary Chadwick, London Weekend Television quoted Alexander 2013 p84.)

    Comprehensive Melvin Bragg overview of her life and work from old TV programme. Discusses Godwin’s landscape photography in the context of conventions and innovation in landscape art and critique of ‘picturesque’. Includes many interviews with Fay herself on her responses to landscape and approaches to photography.

    She combined her landscape photography with environmental activism against the ravages of 1980s Thatcherism and as President of the Ramblers’ Association.

    https://youtu.be/XqwOpkOkuzE
    Mavis Nicholson interviews Fay Godwin on the ‘In with Mavis’ program from 1991. She talks a lot about her photography in the context of her environmental activism, particularly destruction of landscapes because of building of the Channel Tunnel.
    Selection of prints from the 25th anniversary of Fay Godwin’s seminal exhibition and book Land from the original exhibition. https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org…
    Peter Cattrell worked as Fay Godwin’s printer. Interesting discussion of printing choices he made. And discussion of her last experiments placing objects on photographic plates as experiments. Also some interesting insights into her personality -as well as poignancy of her fragility, illnesses and death.
    • Rebecca the Lurcher. 1973
    • The Oldest Road: An Exploration of the Ridgeway. 1975. With J.R.L. Anderson.
    • Remains of Elmet. Rainbow Press, 1979. With poems by Ted Hughes.
      • Remains of Elmet. Faber and Faber, 1979. ISBN 9780571278763.
      • Elmet. Faber and Faber, 1994. With new additional poems and photographs.
      • Remains of Elmet. Faber and Faber, 2011. ISBN 9780571278763.
    • The Saxon Shore Way. Hutchinson (publisher), 1983. With Alan Sillitoe. ISBN 0091514606.
    • Land. Heinemann, 1985. With John Fowles. ISBN 0434303054.
    • !!Edge of the Land
    • Glassworks & Secret Lives. 1999. ISBN 0953454517.
    • Landmarks. Stockport: Dewi Lewis, 2002. ISBN 1-899235-73-6. With an introduced by Simon Armitage and an essay by Roger Taylor.

  • Shirley Baker

    Images on Mary  Evans Picture Library

    Google Images

    Shirley Baker, (1932-2014), was one of the rare female photographers who chronicled life in the north of England from the 1950s onwards. Her street photography was in the ‘flaneuse’ tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, whom she named as influences. Unposed snapshots of people going about their business were juxtaposed with telling graffiti. She had a great eye for composition that has been under-appreciated next to her compassionate documentation and concern for social injustice, with a particular focus on women and children.

    From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art and would always carry her camera modestly stowed in her handbag. In free periods, she began a body of work, spanning 15 years, of the social housing in the area that was being demolished as people lived in semi-derelict slums. Shirley’s work in Salford and Manchester (shot mainly between 1960 and 1973) captured a time of rapid social and economic change in the lives of working class people in Manchester and Salford.”It was a time of much change: people were turfed out of their homes and some squatted in old buildings, trying to hang on to the traditional life they knew.”

    Slum clearances, started in the 1930s, resumed in earnest in the 1950s, and in the twenty years between 1955 and 1975, around 1.3 million homes were demolished nationwide. When Shirley Baker began photographing the streets of her native Salford, it seemed that no-one was interested in recording the human story of these soon-to-be demolished communities. Old ladies sitting on doorsteps in a row of condemned houses, men with handcarts searching for refuse to be recycled, children playing inventively among rubble and abandoned cars. That she chose to preserve these moments on film, now seems like the only perceptive response to a vanishing environment. It was not until 1989 that her first book, Street Photographs: Manchester and Salford, was published and Baker began to be more widely appreciated.

    In addition to her work in Manchester and Salford, she spent a considerable amount of time capturing Camden Market at the height of punk. Her work was often humorous and she added over the years to collections such as owners who look like their dogs and people falling asleep in public.

    Remembering the work of Shirley Baker Phil Coomes  BBC

    Life

    (from Guardian Obituary)

    Born in Salford, to Alec, a furniture maker, and Josephine, a housewife, Shirley had an identical twin, Barbara, who would also become an artist. They both went as boarders to Penrhos College, in Colwyn Bay, from where during the second world war they were evacuated to Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire. Their parents were unfazed by their daughters pursuing the arts professionally after they left school.

    Baker married Tony Levy, a GP, in 1957, and the couple eventually settled in Wilmslow, Cheshire, where their daughter, Nan, was born in 1963. Baker never displayed any of her photographs around their home, although she did like to take pictures of the family. This perhaps summed up the private, almost secretive, nature of her work.

    When Baker studied  photography at Manchester College of Technology, there was only one other woman on the course. On finishing, Baker’s plan was to work in-house at a company, recording processes and producing promotional images. She started at Courtaulds fabric manufacturers before freelancing for other businesses and doing some journalism, including for the Guardian. Baker encountered difficulties getting a press card, so was unable to pursue photojournalism seriously, and believed she was only given the assignments deemed unsuitable for men. From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art.

    Baker kept photographing in later life and completed an MA in critical history and the theory of photography at the University of Derby in 1995. She joined the Mary Evans Picture Library in 2008, and in 2012 had solo shows in Oldham and Salford, with another planned for 2015 at the Photoraphers’ Gallery in London. She was always pleased when people who featured in her work came along to exhibitions. At the opening of the Lowry Gallery in 2000, the Queen not only viewed Baker’s photographs but met some of Baker’s subjects, too.