The landscape has changed
Fay Godwin, one of the foremost landscape photographers in Britain has passed away. Charles Mapleston, who is currently editing a film portrait of Godwin, pays tribute to her
Fay Godwin, who died on 27 May aged 74, was a tireless environmental campaigner in her life and work. Celebrated particularly for her black-and-white landscape images and collaborations with noted writers, she also experimented with colour and digital technology.
The daughter of a British diplomat and an American artist, Godwin was born in Berlin and had a peripatetic childhood abroad, before settling in London in the 1950s and marrying publisher Anthony Godwin in 1961.
The couple had two sons, and Fay Goldwin took up photography to take the family snaps. Eventually she learned to print, and when her husband left her in the mid-1970s, she decided to try to earn her living through photography.
Using her publishing contacts, she started photographing writers' portraits for book dust-jackets.
Inspired by the Lake District guides of Alfred Wainwright, Godwin went on to produce a series of walkers' handbooks in partnership with authors, including JRL Anderson, Derek Cooper, John Fowles, Richard Ingrams and Alan Sillitoe. But it was the collaboration with Ted Hughes on Remains of Elmet (1979) that proved most successful: Godwin and Hughes exchanged poems and images, each inspiring the other.
Several Arts Council bursaries funded travel in England and Scotland creating work that resulted in Land, a book and major exhibition. In 1987 she became president of the Ramblers' Association and, deciding she could serve the organisation best through photography, created Our Forbidden Land (1970), a powerful polemic for the right to roam.
A photographic residency at the National Museum of Photography in Bradford led Godwin to use colour to document the city's urban landscape. This new colour work resulted in Glassworks and Secret Lives (1999), which she had to publish independently.
In 2001, Godwin had a major retrospective show, Landmarks, at London's Barbican Gallery. The show subsequently toured, concluding at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh in 2003.
She loved walking along the coast near her Sussex home, beachcombing to make images of driftwood and fishing nets. Some of this she took home to create surreal collages using a digital scanner as her camera.
A forceful character, passionate and committed, she also had a subtle sense of humour. This duality can be seen in her work, which is often both humorous and chilling in the same instant.
Zelda Cheatle, gallerist
'Fay Godwin was one the strongest voices in photography. Her work had a power and a dynamism, which spoke to people of all ages. Her sensitivity, her intelligence and undaunted spirit and clear eye made her photographs special. Many of her landscapes, many of her books, many of her portraits of the literary world will be amongst us forever. Her humour, her friendship, her generosity, her challenging of the world I will miss. Her work will live on, but I, among hundreds who have worked closely with Fay, will miss her, the person.'
John Blakemore, landscape photographer
'Fay was very influential in showing photographers, especially amateurs, new ways of approaching their work. She was also enormously supportive of my own work. She was courageous as a person, indomitable in fact, and so her death was a surprise. She was a remarkable woman for achieving such status especially as a woman in that field. This was something she did so successively, if not irascibly.'
