Fay Godwin

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2002

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is the landscape photographer Fay Godwin. Her evocative pictures brought Fay Godwin to the notice of the poet Ted Hughes and their collaboration Remains of Elmet led Fay to "discover Britain through the soles of her feet", taking photographs as she walked the length and breadth of the British Isles. In conversation with Sue Lawley, she talks about her life and work and chooses eight records to take to the mythical island.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: 5th movement, String Quartet No 13 in Bflat by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: The Rattlebag: An Anthology of Poetry by Ted Hughes Luxury: Egg tempura paints, brushes, and boards to paint on

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a photographer. It's her love of landscape which made her reputation,
0:35.5	but her career began with portraits of famous literary figures such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes,
0:41.3	whom she'd met through her work in publishing. In 1979, she collaborated
0:46.3	with Ted Hughes on a book about the valleys of West Yorkshire where he'd spent his childhood.
0:51.6	And really from then on, Land and its relationship to man became the
0:54.8	central theme of her work. A passionate walker she also became president of the
0:59.6	Ramblers Association using her photographic skills to campaign for Walker's rights of way.
1:05.0	Determinedly unromantic, her dispassionate lens has created a truthfully evocative picture of Britain at the end of the 20th century. If people look closely at
1:15.5	my pictures, she says, they might possibly see something else as well. She is Fay Godwin.
1:22.1	I'm looking Fay at a picture you took some 20 years ago of Dover, the eastern docks.
1:27.8	It's taken from up on the cliff looking across to the docks where a ferry is coming in and a ferry is going out.
1:33.2	It's a heavy winter's day and the cliffs are coated with snow.
1:36.2	It's full of chilly atmosphere and I know it's a picture that you're particularly proud of.
1:40.8	Can you tell me why?
1:42.0	Well I was interested in that because I'd been to the white cliffs of Dover about five times and hadn't ever even got the camera out.
1:49.0	And then I woke up in London and it had snowed, so I thought, well, I'll try'll try the usual way half an inch of snow
1:54.4	meant it took several hours to get down to Dover and I had just a few minutes to take
1:59.0	pictures but there was the snow and the white cliffs of Dover and what's so interesting is that I got
2:05.6	it with a couple of ferries doing their stuff that was luck was it absolutely well
2:10.4	I mean they're perfectly positioned well I may have waited, probably took two or three exposures, but what was very interesting
	...

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