Fay Godwin
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Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 – 27 May 2005). Famous British photographer.
Godwin was born in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of a British diplomat and an American artist. She married Penguin Editor-in-Chief Tony Godwin. In 1966 she became interested in photography, through photographing her two young sons. She was self-taught in photography, and became a professional in 1969 when her marriage ended.
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 most well-known landscape photographer. Her early and mature work was informed by the sense of ecological crisis present in late 1970s and 1980s England. Her early books were in the documentary tradition, but from the late 1970s onwards she moved more towards art photography.
In 1986 the South Bank Show TV arts programme made her the subject of a full-length documentary. The first ever on a photographer, it was broadcast on 9th November.
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.
Godwin had exhibitions which have toured Britain, her last major retrospective was at the Barbican Centre, London in 2001. One major show at the Warwick Arts Centre failed to get any reviews, and this caused her to self-publish her final books; Glassworks and Secret Lives. A good retrospective book, Landmarks, was published by Dewi Lewis in 2002.
Godwin served as the President of the Ramblers' Association from 1987 to 1990, after which she became Life Vice-President.
The slipcase Rainbow Press 1979 first edition of Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence, her book collaboration with poet Ted Hughes, has become highly collectible and fetches several thousand pounds. The book was also published in popular form by Faber (with poor reproduction of the images), and then re-published by them in 1994 simply as Elmet with a third of the book being new additional poems and photographs. Hughes called the 1994 Elmet the "definitive" edition. Godwin also said, in a 2001 interview, that this was the book she would like to be most remembered for.
All her reproduction rights are handled by the Collections Picture Library.
Godwin died in Hastings at the age of 74.
