Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 11 October 2003-11 January 2004

Meal Mor, Glencoe by Fay Godwin

SADLY, THIS EXCELLENT collection of work by Fay Godwin is not coming to any of the Highland galleries, but her landscape photographs include many striking images from Highland locations, and it is well worth catching on a visit to the capital.

Nor does it end with her landscapes, although they remain her best know works. The exhibition also includes a generous selection of her early portraits of literary figures (including Doris Lessing, Ted Hughes, Kingsley Amis, our own Liz Lochhead fixing her make-up, and a striking pair of Salman Rushdie), along with representation of her rural portraiture project from the Forest of Dean, urban studies in Bradford, and more recent semi-abstract work with Polaroids.

Her brooding black and white landscape studies are her trademark, however, and she has the enviable capacity to suggest a great deal within the frame of a static shot. Her pioneering work toward opening up the access debate is starkly reflected in ‘The Duke of Westminster’s Estate, Forest of Bowland’, a famous shot of an expansive moorland stretching away into the far distance, with a small “Private” sign in the foreground.

Her Highland landscapes are typically varied. ‘Meall Mòr’ juxtaposes the criss-cross of road markings (and implicitly man’s interference in the landscape) with the grandeur of the Glencoe mountain behind it. ‘Tethered Caravan’ says much about the rigours of the weather in the Northern Isles, while evocative shots of standing stones at Callanish and Brodgar are more conventional subjects for reflection on landscape features.

The Highlands photographs also take in Strathspey, Skye, Iona and Sutherland, and stand alongside equally powerful depictions of English and Welsh landscapes. A series of photographs of lava flows from Hawaii offers another alternative perspective on landscape, and like some of her urban work and her recent abstracts, makes use of colour photography.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2003