Fay Godwin

British, born Germany, 1931–2005

Birth placeGermany

BiographyThe photographer Fay Godwin, famed for her collaboration with the late poet laureate Ted Hughes and her belief in the right to roam the countryside, has died aged 74.
Paul Hill, a professor of photography at De Montfort University and a close friend, said she died yesterday in Hastings, East Sussex, after a short illness.

Godwin was best known for her landscape work and portraits of authors such as Hughes and Doris Lessing.

She cemented her reputation when she teamed up with Hughes in 1979 to produce The Remain of Elmet, a collection of poems and photographs.

Born in Berlin in 1931 to a British diplomat father and American artist mother, Godwin settled in London in the late 1950s.

Her interest in photography emerged at the relatively late age of 35 after she began taking pictures of her two young sons.

Her first book, The Oldest Road, was published in 1975 and marked the arrival of a considerable new force in landscape photography.

Three years later the Arts Council gave her one of its first major awards for photography.

After working with Hughes, she went on to collaborate with other writers, including Philip Larkin, Salman Rushdie and the former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams.

In recent years she moved from black and white to colour photography, and from vast landscapes to intimate images of natural life.

But her landscape interests were not confined to photographic subjects. As a passionate walker she campaigned for open access to the countryside and was president of the Ramblers Association from 1987 to 1990.

She often used her photographs to draw attention to harm being done to the environment. This resulted in a critique called Our Forbidden Land, which won the first Green Book of the Year Award.

She was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1990.

Godwin is survived by two sons, Jeremy and Nick, and two granddaughters.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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