Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 – 27 May 2005) was a British photographer known for her black-and-white landscapes of the British countryside and coast.
Career
Godwin was introduced to the London literary scene. She produced portraits of dozens of well-known writers, photographing almost every significant literary figure in 1970s and 1980s England, as well as numerous visiting foreign authors. Her subjects, typically photographed in the sitters' own homes, included Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Günter Grass, Ted Hughes, Clive James, Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing, Robert Lowell, Edna O'Brien, Anthony Powell, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, and Tom Stoppard.
After the publication of her first books—Rebecca the Lurcher (1973) and The Oldest Road: An Exploration of the Ridgeway (1975), co-authored with J.R.L. Anderson—she was a prolific publisher, working mainly in the landscape tradition to great acclaim and becoming the nation's best-known landscape photographer. The Oldest Road sold over 25,000 copies. Her work was informed by the sense of ecological crisis present in late 1970s and 1980s England.
In the 1990s she was offered a Fellowship at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (now the National Media Museum) in Bradford, which pushed her work in the direction of colour and urban documentary.
She also began taking close-ups of natural forms. A major exhibition of that work was toured by Warwick Arts Centre from 1995 to 1997; Godwin self-published a small book of that work in 1999, titled Glassworks & Secret Lives, which was distributed from a small local bookshop in her adopted hometown of Hastings in East Sussex.</blockquote>
Godwin's last major retrospective was at the Barbican Centre, London in 2001. A retrospective book, Landmarks, was published by Dewi Lewis in 2002.
Awards and recognition
Godwin was the subject of a documentary, broadcast on The South Bank Show on 9 November 1986.
She was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 1990 and had a major retrospective at the Barbican Centre in London in 2001.
Godwin died on 27 May 2005, in Hastings, England at the age of 74. After her death, the Ramblers' Association, an organisation led by Godwin from 1987 to 1990, described her presidency as a time when its "long-running right-to-roam campaign was turned up to the full-strength pressure which ultimately resulted in the access provisions enshrined in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 and the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003."
Godwin's archive, including approximately 11,000 exhibition prints, the entire contents of her studio, and correspondence with some of her subjects, was given to the British Library.