Sometimes a long prior sequence of failures

Sometime people read my collages or photograms as landscapes. Sometimes I read them as landscapes myself: it’s fine by me. The first book with black and white photography I ever bought was ‘The Oldest Road – an exploration of The Ridgeway’ by J.R.L. Anderson and Fay Godwin (1975). Godwin was the photographer. I bought it when it was published, after walking the route along the chalk downs in Wiltshire when I was 15. It cost £2.50 – that was really shelling out – but it was a stylish record of the walking, and that was the point for me then.

I’d been used to the illustrations in books like the Batsford series: monochrome, portraying classic, dramatic vistas of mountains, hills, coast and rolling farmland. The difference with Godwin’s book was how plain and minimal the images were. The Wiltshire Downs are not that dramatic anyway, but she seemed to go out of her way to simplify: dark, flat horizon lines broken only by isolated tree-clumps, close-ups of uneven chalk lumps or the earthworks of hill-forts, Uffington white horse broken into modernist abstracts.

I remember being really intrigued by the repetitions – this was new – three views of the same stone at Avebury, four of West Kennet long-barrow, seven (!) successive photos of the same group of trees, getting closer and closer till the camera is surrounded by tree trunks. This was my first experience of photography as art project, rather than guidebook or souvenir.

’The Oldest Road’ was Godwin’s second book. Many other books followed, in particular ‘Remains of Elmet’ (1979) with poems by Ted Hughes, and ‘Land’ (1985), a collection of her best photographs from the previous ten years. The photos never came easily: they required patience, perfectionism, the willingness to wait for the right, serendipitous moment. This is what the author John Foyles said in his introduction to ‘Land’:

”It might seem from many of Fay’s photographs here that she is unfairly accompanied by great good luck in terms of light and cloud and the rest: but I know in truth many of them required days of waiting, sometimes return visits from London, sometimes a long prior sequence of failures.”