Landscape in black and white

I've been thinking about and looking back at the work of some of the photographers whose exhibitions I admired in the 1980s at Newcastle's wonderful Side Gallery, now sadly closed but the place where I first looked seriously at photographs. I've also searched online for second hand books relating to these exhibitions. Age and relative rarity has made some of them very expensive, but this was an Ebay bargain: Fay Godwin took beautiful black and white landscape photographs, and published a number of books  about different regions and long distance footpaths in partnership with writers and poets. I'm waiting impatiently for Elmet, in which her photographs of the Yorkshire Dales accompany poems by Ted Hughes, to arrive in the next few days, and looking out for a reasonably priced copy of Land, the collection exhibited in York's Impressions Galley in the late seventies which was my first experience of a photographic gallery (part of a day out from university life in Durham and one of my first trips with P - a good start to a lifetime together!).  

Our Forbidden Land, published in 1990, combines photography and poetry with Fay Godwin's campaigning work as president of the Ramblers' Association. She documents both beautiful footpaths and instances of the despoilment of or loss of access to countryside as a result of factors including factory farming, tipping and the 1980s privatisations of formerly public assets; they are powerful photographs and her text is a passionate plea to the public and politicians to wake up to what they are losing before it's too late. The issues have not gone away, but I do think the situation has improved in the past forty years, and as I enjoy and photograph the many beautiful and well signposted and maintained footpaths in this area, I'm grateful to the generation who raised awareness and worked for our right to access our environment.