Ray and Fay

I'm amazed, and slightly ashamed, to discover that I have not once mentioned the name of Raymond Moore and only glancingly referred to the name of Fay Godwin in the two years of this blog's life. I'm not the only one; Ray and Fay seem to have dropped off the map in recent years. But, to anyone who knows what they're talking about, Raymond Moore and Fay Godwin are, in their different ways, arguably the most influential figures in British photography of the last 40 years.

Fay Godwin was and is considerably better known to the wider public than Raymond Moore; she, after all, did do Desert Island Discs, and he did not. Her work as a "right to roam" activist and president of the Rambler's Association brought her to prominence in a country that, rightly, values walking as an an activity over making or looking at art photography. She is clearly coming back up on the wheel of fortune: the National Media Museum, Bradford has an exhibition currently: Fay Godwin: Land Revisited, 15 October 2010 - 27 March 2011. Raymond Moore, by contrast, has more or less fallen off the wheel altogether.

If you can accept the idea of the world as an array of overlapping sets (Venn diagrams, if you can remember those), then the overlap between the sets of those who liked Fay and those who liked Ray was crucial in the 1970s and 80s. That was where the interesting stuff was happening, for example at Duckspool workshops or in the pages of Creative Camera. The sets left of Ray included the darkly austere work of Thomas Joshua Cooper, climbing into the high, conceptualist territory where the likes of Victor Burgin and John Goto roamed; to the right of Fay was the monochrome sublime of John Blakemore, falling off rapidly to the lower, populist ground of "golden hour" landscapes and sunsets. In the middle, in that overlap, was where the action was -- see those wonderful volumes / time capsules, the Creative Camera International Yearbooks, published 1975-79. Though what would have happened if the leftermost conceptual set had ever been forced to overlap with the rightermost pictorialist set is the stuff of theoretical physics.

Not by Fay or by Ray, but by me.
(we don't mess with copyright on this site)

Fay's work is easy to "get", but well seen, often witty, beautifully composed and printed, and above all celebratory of the British landscape you see once you have got your boots on and left the car park behind. It's all about looking for "right place, right time". A photographer in the Godwin mould might tramp the hills or the coast for hours, waiting to plant a tripod like an explorer's flag on a mountain top. She makes you want to get out there with the hillforts and pillboxes and large white clouds. The best of her photographs return you to the real landscape of footpaths in sheep-gnawed grass and rabbit droppings, not to some absurdly-coloured confection made with a graduated filter.

Everyone should own a copy of her book Land, published in 1985. It is an impeccably designed and sequenced book, from the Big Bang of the photo book boom. Her collaboration with Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet, is also a classic. A personal favourite is The Drovers' Roads of Wales (1977, text by Shirley Toulson, photos by Godwin), as that was the landscape where the Prof and I first deepened our acquaintance and which we revisit every Easter, and that book was our guide (and in fact the book that turned me on to photography).

Ray Moore's photographs are more difficult to "get" -- impenetrable to some -- but are the work of an underrated genius. Seriously: he's up there with Josef Koudelka and William Eggleston, for me. His work is the very definition of my distinction between photographs made "from" rather than "of" their subject matter (see this old post). He has a personal language of tone and shape and line which he finds expressed most frequently in those scruffy, marginal "landscapes" that occur where the urban and industrial worlds shade into the natural world, or what is left of it. A mood of rapt melancholy pervades them. A photographer from the Moore camp mooches around the edges of caravan sites and car parks with a hand-held camera, looking for moments of sublime synchronicity which will pull everything together. It is not surprising that dogs, happily sniffing a trail through puddles and debris, figure so frequently in his images.

Everyone should own a copy of his book Murmurs At Every Turn, published in 1981. But, first, find yourself one. I have spent a lot of time tracking down copies of the printed Moore oeuvre. All out of print, all very scarce. Tragically, his photographic archive has also apparently ended up in limbo, having failed to find a buyer at Sotheby's (see this blog post). As far as I know, there has not been a single exhibition of his work since he died in 1987, and there is no retrospective volume of his work in process anywhere. This is unforgivably shameful, given his standing in British photography, and given the amount of money spent by wealthy know-nothings on derivative photographs at the flashy end of the spectrum.

Also not by Fay or Ray (but quite Late Godwin-ish).
I've been reviewing my "university windows" series and,
boy, have I got some stuff to show you...