Education Quote by Fay Godwin

A quiet rebuke to artistic gatekeeping hides inside Fay Godwin's plainspoken line. When a photographer says she's "not faithful to one particular medium", she's not confessing fickleness; she's rejecting the idea that craft is a church with one approved ritual. Godwin worked in an era when photographic identity could harden into dogma: black-and-white traditionalists vs. color converts, darkroom purists vs. new processes, documentary truth-tellers vs. formal experimenters. Her phrasing borrows the moral language of loyalty and betrayal, then flips it. Fidelity, she implies, should be to the work itself, not the tool.

The second clause sharpens the stakes: "what I try to teach to people who work with me". This isn't an abstract manifesto; it's workplace culture. Godwin is describing an apprenticeship model where assistants and collaborators are often trained into replication. She's pushing against that, asking them to think like problem-solvers rather than stylists. Medium becomes a means, not a brand.

Subtextually, it's also a defense against the market's demand for recognizability. The art world rewards the easily legible signature look; clients want consistency; institutions like labels. Godwin's refusal reads as both practical and principled: if the landscape, the politics of land use, or the mood of a place demands a different approach, the artist who clings to one process is choosing comfort over accuracy.

In a medium constantly threatened by its own mythology of authenticity, Godwin locates integrity somewhere more slippery: responsiveness.