Elmet

Continuing my occasional series on photography books on my bookshelf, I have been looking this week at Elmet, a book of poems by Ted Hughes with photographs by Fay Godwin. Elmet is the name for the last independent Celtic kingdom in England which originally covered most of Yorkshire but which at the time when Hughes was writing these poems in the 1970s and 80s, he used to describe that area of inhospitable Pennine moorland where he grew up in the upper Calder valley around Halifax and Heptonstall, stretching over the Lancashire border a little way. The book, originally published as The Remains of Elmet in 1979, and later extended to the present edition, was a mutually reciprocal collaboration between the poet and the photographer. Hughes began by writing the poetry in response to some of Godwin's photographs of the area and the enterprise developed with the poetry triggering further images.

I am not normally a great fan of words accompanying photographs, somehow feeling that the photograph should be able to convey its meaning and impact without the addition of explanatory text.  In this case, however, the two go together hand in hand, Godwin's beautifully evocative black and white images being a perfect illustration for Hughes' spare, uncompromising poems.  The landscape they evoke is bleak and harsh, an expanse of brooding moorland and dark skies, occasionally lit up with piercing shafts of light. This is the landscape of Wuthering Heights and the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, whose dark satanic mills and forbidding Methodist chapels shaped the lives of its inhabitants, leaving their marks on the land. The photographs in the book range from windswept moorland with its isolated farmsteads, sheep and drystone walls to the blackened chimneys, cobbled streets and back-to-backs of the old mill towns, peopled with the occasional stalwart inhabitant. They so perfectly and utterly evoke not only a strong spirit of the place, but also the sense of a long-gone era.    

Stanbury Moor

          Wadsworth Moor

          Where the millstone of sky
          Grinds light and shadow so purple-fine

          And has ground it so long

          Grinding the skin off earth
          Earth bleeds her raw true darkness

          A land naked now as a wound
          That the sun swabs and dabs

          Where the miles of agony are numbness
          And harebell and heather a euphoria.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Crow Hill above Mytholmroyd

Alcomden

Colne

Mytholmroyd

Hebden Bridge

Path and Reservoir above Lumbutts

Alcomden

Bridestones Moor

Blake Dean

          Emily Brontë

          The wind on Crow Hill was her darling.
          His fierce, high tale in her ear was her secret.
          But his kiss was fatal.

          Through her dark Paradise ran 

          The stream she loved too well

          That bit her breast.

          The shaggy sodden king of that kingdom 

          Followed through the wall
          And lay on her love-sick bed.

          The curlew trod in her womb.

          Her death is a baby-cry on the moor

          The stone swelled under her heart.

Top Withens

          From Two Photographs of Top Withens

                              ....But the tree -
          that's still there, unchanged beside its partner, 

          Where my camera held (for that moment) a ghost.

Fay Godwin's photography included both portraiture and documentary but it is for her work on the British landscape that she is most recognised - the Land trilogy - Land (1985), Our Forbidden Land (1990) and The Edge of the Land (1995).  In the foreword to Landmarks, a retrospective of her best-known work, Yorkshire poet and playwright Simon Armitage points out that her photographs illustrate 'a human desire for order and regularity, its endless urge to impose structure and pattern on a planet whose ultimate beauty is its unpredictability, its randomness, and its wild freedom.'  As such they are not merely documentary or landscape photographs but have a 'psychological and philosophical subtext' dealing as they do with environmental and political concerns.  In his excellent introductory essay to the same book, photography historian Roger Taylor describes her as a 'topographer with attitude' - someone who goes out into the the landscape to report back on what they had personally encountered. 

She was a dedicated and dogged photographer who realised the importance of the 'revealing' properties of light, often returning to the same spot many times until she got the photograph she wanted. An expert printer, her photographs display a 'mastery of the elusive grammar of greys' and are usually printed out at the (by today's standard) small size of 16"x12", and never bigger than 24"x20".  I was lucky enough to see an exhibition of her work a few years ago at the National Media Museum in Bradford and can testify to the exquisite beauty of her prints. Fay Godwin's work is restrained and modest, not blowing its own trumpet in any way. It is authentic and principled without being sanctimonious or politically correct - the type of work which nowadays too often gets ignored or overlooked.  

You can read the last interview before her death in 2005 here.  Also a good article by author Margaret Drabble about her exhibition Land Revisted at the National Media Museum in 2011

All photographs by Fay Godwin

Poems by Ted Hughes

Six of the best....landscape

The final selection in the six of the best of 2012 series.

Landscape isn't my usual choice of photographic subject but this year I seem to have been photographing more out in the fields than anywhere else!  I have tried to capture an impression of how I perceive the landscape whilst walking rather than presenting an idealised version of my surroundings - what I am looking for in my images is the communication of a sense of place.

No evidence of the sublime round here - this part of the world is not blessed with dramatic or wild scenery but displays instead a quiet and restrained beauty.  Everywhere are the signs of man's hand on the landscape - pathways trodden through the fields; hedges, fences and gates; discarded bits of farming equipment; crops and livestock - a working countryside with traces of centuries of cultivation.

As I have already shown quite a few landscape photographs on this blog, the six selected below are the best of the rest.....

Open Skies

Don McCullin is not normally a name associated with landscape photography, being more well-known for his war photography and urban images. Yet his book Open Skies which I have been dipping into this week, is full of the most wonderful, impelling black and white landscapes. The photographs, shot on film and printed dark as dark can be, are mainly of the Somerset Levels where McCullin settled after many years photographing the worst atrocities and harrowing scenes in war zones all over the world. This is not the standard picturesque vision of the English landscape, with summer sunshine and fluffy clouds. They show a windswept, stark expanse of countryside in winter, under dark and louring skies, and must surely be an expression of an anguished soul trying to come to terms with what he has been through. In the preface, McCullin states

"After photographing wars and revolutions for two decades, the memories of those painful years nearly always try to spoil my days, even now, here in England....My solace lies in recording what remains of the beautiful landscape of Somerset and its metallic dark skies, which give this county an aged and sometimes remote feeling as if the past is struggling against the future. The stillness of silence and sometimes my loneliness provoke my imagination, but, like the surrounding land, I am fighting to release the past in me."

I often struggle with the idea of a landscape expressing the photographer's emotions but in this case, there is no doubt that they do.  McCullin is a modest man not given to discussing the 'meaning' of his pictures - in the introduction to the book, novelist John Fowles compares his reticence with the "many photographers these days who, not satisfied with simply printing their work, have to develop it in a totally unnecessary linguistic darkroom and puff it in fashionable art-gallery jargon.  That murky slough of turgid self-justification.... Don expects his images to be their own commentary, like all decent artists." This was written in 1989 - imagine what he would have to say these days with the plethora of mind-numbing 'artist statements' which 'challenge, explore and interrogate' ad infinitum! This is work which stands on its own without the need for words. Inspiration indeed.

         

All photographs Don McCullin from Open Skies.

Close to home

As a photographer, one of the main challenges I find is to renew my sense of wonder in the world.  When you pass by the same sights day after day, it is easy to stop looking closely, to let it all pass under the radar. Familiarity all too often does breed contempt and none more so than in our immediate surroundings. Our eyes become dulled so we seek excitement in pastures new to stimulate our jaded senses. I have lived here in the country for over 17 years, walked the same walks, watched the seasons change and the landscape gradually alter over the year, and although I am still able to appreciate its natural beauty, I feel I have gradually stopped noticing things. In an effort to counter this, I have decided to embark on a series of walks within a five-mile radius of my home, photographs of which I will feature on the blog on a regular basis.

I am not intending this to be a straightforward documentary project, but more an attempt at evoking a sense of place and my relationship to it.  There will be no shots of spectacular landscapes or stunning sunsets, no picture postcard views or bright, saturated colours - it is easy enough to make pleasing images of such scenes but that is not what interests me. Let's face it, for much of the year the countryside can be rather dull - murky shades of green and brown under an overcast sky, muddy fields and dripping trees do not on the face of it make an obvious choice of subject matter but I am hoping that I will be able to find some inspiration out there!

Here are some images I took at the weekend on an extremely unpromising afternoon - cold, dull and with a light but persistent rain.  Yet some moments of quiet beauty and unexpected sights were still to be found....