On the advice of my Tutor, and feedback on my images from other students, I am revisiting Godwin, who keeps coming up and did a lot of work near Rye on the Romney Marsh area. My previous post, a long time ago now, is here: https://photography515050.wordpress.com/2015/12/06/gianluca-cosci-fay-godwin/. I found a few images from Romney Marsh in her book Land, and got a copy of a guidebook she co-authored: Romney Marsh and the Royal Military Canal (which passes by Rye Harbour). Romney Marsh, I learn, is the generic name for the area enclosing Rye, Dungeness and Hythe – 50,000 acres in all.
A key thing I noted in my previous post is that Godwin saw herself as a documentary photographer (as opposed to landscape, or aesthetic) and this is particularly clear in her later work at a time when perhaps she could be considered campaigner as much as photographer. As I discussed in the link above this can be considered as activism art – a performance intended to create a change in behaviour. If this approach is more successful at achieving the artist’s aims than purely aesthetic work, then this is certainly a valid approach.
I also questioned the quality of the reproductions of her work in some books, and the guidebook mentioned above does indeed suffer in this regard (as many guidebooks do, particularly walking books). The image above actually comes from a screenshot of a rather quirky blog somebody made about the book (it does not appear to come from the book itself), and a good example for my paragraph above although it actually predates her later more activist/documentary work (I don’t have a date for the image but it must have been taken before 1980, when the guidebook was published – Godwin’s approach developed with Land Matters, but this was not published until 1990). There are also quite a number of aesthetic images as well as detail shots of items of interest the walker may find along the way. There are two images of Camber Castle, one of which also appears in the key monograph Land. Both pictures use Castle Water as a perspective device from the bottom right of the frame, something that Godwin uses frequently in her work. Even allowing for the backlighting on a screen the image below from the British Library is a very different beast from the rather flat mid-toned animal found in the guidebook, with the monograph achieving something in between.
I was aware that these illustrative photographs are commercial works necessary to provide Godwin with an income. While this might motivate the diversity of imagary, it is possible that Fig. 1 above is an early example of what was to follow, slipped in to a more typical series.
It was interesting to me that John Piper, who has written on Romney Marsh, says in the introduction “I don’t think I know much about it. What I really like about it is that it is all – 97% – atmosphere” (Godwin & Ingrams, 1980:8). This somehow sums it up very well – difficult to describe in words or pictures but very compelling to be in. “There is a sense of enchantment … I can quite believe that strange things go on in this part of the world” (Godwin & Ingrams, 1980:32).
The introductory text furthers my impression of a palimpsestuous landscape (potential title for body of work and/or dissertation?) – Nennius, in the ninth century AD, describing not a marsh but a group of 60 rocky islands each with an eagle’s nest on top (sounding a bit like an opening sequence from Game of Thrones!). The Rhee Wall – two parallel earth banks 50-100m apart, was built (by Romans or Saxons is apparently unclear) from Greatstone to Appledore. According to the guidebook this was to protect the land to the East. However wikipedia suggests this was constructed in the 13th century to wash silt away fro New Romney… Both sources agree that the course of the Rother was diverted by the great storm of 1287 to meet the sea at Rye. Following this the land to the west of the Rhee Wall was gradually reclaimed using drainage schemes, providing excellent agricultural land. Residents of the Marsh paid a tax known as a “scot” to maintain the drainage, and those on higher ground got off “scot-free”.
The flat land of the marsh, bordered by deep water at high tide, presents an excellent French invasion site. There is a long history of military defence construction in the area, which have decayed gracefully (photographically?). The Royal Military Canal is one such construction, 70 feet wide and 7ft deep, cutting off Romney Marsh.
The guidebook is charmingly old-fashioned in a very British way, containing phrases such as “the invention of the motor car” and “well-preserved women of fifty”! It could be thought of as a work of art “of its time”. The extensive photographs required Godwin to show a range that she would step away from in later years. From her earlier images celebrating the land to her later ones protesting at what we were doing to it, via references to HCB (boy jumping ditch, paired here with an image of a cow looking at the wistfully at the ditch that appears to make humourous allusion to the jumping cow in the nursery rhyme) and even an abstract that reminded me of Siskind (although revisiting Land, I can find the occasional more abstract shot such as Fenced Dunes in Snow, Camber, Kent and Flooded Grass near Rhulen, Wales. The latter has influences of Ansel Adams, and as mentioned in my previous Godwin post there are also hints of Brandt, most obvious in Top Withens. The scope of the writing is also eccentric, with the same Piper quoted so quaintly at the beginning of this blog piece also suggesting the use of a small bomb to take out the despised modern stained glass of Winchelsea Church, “happy to smash the whole lot in one tidy blast” (Godwin & Ingrams, 1980:36)! In fact it is almost useless as a guidebook in that it seems not to follow any particular route for long, getting distracted along the way by various points of interest. To be fair it warns you of this in advance: “There are plenty of guide-books available and this is not intended as another one” (Godwin & Ingrams, 1980:11).
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- Godwin, F. (s.d.) Martello Tower No. 30. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyP2k8eb5J4 (Accessed 30.8.2022)
- Godwin, F. (1980) Camber Castle and Water. At: https://imagesonline.bl.uk/asset/30470/ (Accessed 30.8.2022)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Godwin, F. & Ingrams, I. (1980) Romney Marsh and the Royal Military Canal. London: Wildwood House
Level 3.1 Learning Log 
2 thoughts on “Fay Godwin”