Landmarks: A Survey

Landmarks celebrates the work of Fay Godwin, one of the UK’s most respected and influential photographers. Drawing on the whole body of her photographic practice, it includes literary portraits, humorous snapshots, and rural and urban landscapes, as well as the intimate series of color images, Glassworks, that marks the most recent evolution of her vision. Leading poet and novelist, Simon Armitage introduces the work, and an essay by photographic historian Roger Taylor explores and illuminates both her career and her approach to photography.

Godwin’s early work includes a significant body of intimate and revealing literary portraits of writers and poets including Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Salman Rushdie, Günter Grass and Ted Hughes, with whom she later worked collaboratively on the book Elmet, a dialogue between poet and photographer.

Fay Godwin is however best known for her landscape work, through which she reveals the rich and intricate patterning of the British landscape and its relationship to the people who live and work there. Author, or co-author, of seventeen books, she has a reputation as a committed environmentalist and has been President of the British Ramblers Association. Her work has also been recognised through Fellowships at the National Museum of Photography and the Royal Photographic Society and her work is held by major galleries including The National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria & Albert Museum, and the National Museum of Photography in the UK and the Bibliothéque Nationale, France, and Stanford Museum of Art, U.S.A.