Fay Godwin (1931 - 2005)

Vintage gelatin silver print
11.5 x 16 cm
Signed on the mount lower right, titled and stamped verso, inscribed verso 'For Ian Murray with Best Wishes Fay Godwin 30.9.77'

Provenance
Ian Murray


During the 1970s and 80s, Fay Godwin was considered one of Britain’s most innovative landscape photographers. Famous for her black and white images of the British countryside, her interest in photography began when she was in her mid-30s when taking photographs of her young children. Godwin was self-taught as access to any form of formal photographic training during the 1970s was extremely limited.

Godwin was keen to avoid sentimentality and the picturesque. She wanted to convey her own personal, sometimes threatening, experience of the landscape. The images are often wild and bleak with striking cloudscapes. Godwin often visited uninhabited areas of Britain; fells and moors, marginal lands with only hints of previous human inhabitants. Old pathways, burial grounds, ancient ruins and stone walls, these abandoned structures highlighted the tension between nature and humanity, pointing to the transience of human culture. The exclusion of rural communities instilled a political element in Godwin and she became a keen campaigner for the ‘right to roam’.

Godwin collaborated on numerous books with, amongst others, the poet Ted Hughes and the novelist John Fowles. A solo exhibition of her work Land was exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 1985 and a major retrospective of her work Landmarks was held at the Barbican Art Gallery in 2001.