Fay Godwin: Landmarks
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, until January 11

Terrain: Landscapes of the Great War by Peter Cattrell
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, until January 4

Some day soon, fingers crossed, we’ll have a Scottish National Museum of Photography, but until that day the nation’s photos will stay at the Portrait Gallery on Queen Street. Fortunately their curators don’t feel bound by the gallery’s portraiture remit, which is why both of their current photography exhibitions are landscape based.

Fay Godwin has been taking photographs for over 30 years, and is best known for her dramatic and politically-charged landscapes, many of which depict the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. This major retrospective from the Barbican squeezes 250 images into the Portrait Gallery’s temporary exhibition space, a tall order which doesn’t quite pay off. The room is all corners and the imposing number of small-scale works fosters a skim-reading approach to the images.

Having said that, the themes and characteristics of Godwin’s work come through loud and clear, mixing humour and social comment with an eye for the ever-changing dynamics of nature. An early series of literary portraits includes a bubbly Jean Rhys, alluring at the age of 84, and a charming triple portrait of Frank Muir in animated conversation with two similarly-coiffed Afghan Hounds.

Godwin loves it when the meaning of signs is changed by their context, and she has captured one Bradford wall whose topmost billboard advertises “Pension plans that grow with you”, with a hoarding underneath warning “AIDS: don’t die of ignorance”. This black, black humour underlies many of Godwin’s works, and can be seen again in Stranded Whale, where the dead animal lies, luminous, in a dark scene of cloud and concrete. It is natural to assume that the grey mass behind the whale is a foam-flecked sea – but look again and it is, bizarrely, a field full of sheep.

This play of light is central to Godwin’s work. The stones at Callanish are gnarled in a stark white light against a pitch-black sky, the silhouette of a ruined house in Yorkshire seems to project a shadow upwards to the heavens, and the rolling hills at Durisdeer are sculpted by the movement of the sun.

Terrain is a different kind of exhibition, curated in collaboration with the Scottish Poetry Library. A well-balanced combination of documentary photography, historical information, and poetry, it is small but perfectly formed. Over the last few years photographer Peter Cattrell has toured the battlefields of the Western Front, in particular the Somme, where his great uncle was killed in 1916. Twenty-four of his black and white images of fields, trees and hills are exhibited alongside matter-of-fact captions which tell us who was stationed there and how many died.

In many cases the images are unremarkable in themselves, but coupled with the captions and the war poetry they become intensely powerful. A clump of grass, blowing in the wind, is where 7000 men died strewn on barbed wire, and Carl Sandburg’s adjacent poem describes the horrors which grass will work to cover over, in time. Terrain is all the more powerful for sticking to the facts, in both images and wall texts. Emotion is only indulged in the poetry, and, inevitably, by you.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 26.10.03