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The lie of the land
John Davies has been photographing landscape for some 30 years. He studied at Nottingham's Trent Polytechnic and in the mid-1970s began making landscape studies of rural Britain, most notably the dramatic mountain vistas of Cumbria and Scotland. Then, in 1981, Davies turned his attention to Britain's urban landscape, an ongoing documentation that continues to this day. This new book coincides with a touring retrospective exhibition and features work made between 1979 and 2005, wherein 60 of Davies best images from the period are reproduced in large format duotone. In the urban context Davies is concerned with Britain's industrial and post-industrial landscape. In the latter case he records the existence and disappearance of industries such as coalmining in the colliery towns of the north; quarried Derbyshire landscapes; the coming and going of the railways, roads and motorways; the moribund cooling towers of coal-fired power stations; the redundant concrete monolith, plonked in the Snowdonia landscape, in its time the first inland Magnox nuclear power station, now sat there to store waste until 2012, in an area where the sheep are radioactive. Davies' almost archaeological approach has seen him revisit sites where previously he had recorded a community founded around industry, to observe the changes since its passing. His pictures are as much about social history as they are about the land, although the land and its (mis)management is a central theme throughout. John Davies' careful choice of viewpoint, more accurately vantage point, is just one aspect that sets his remarkable work apart.
The British Landscape by John Davies is published by Chris Boot, price £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0-9546894-7-X.
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