Art & Creativity Quote by Fay Godwin

Godwin’s advice is a polite slap at gear culture before “gear culture” had an algorithm. It’s the voice of a working photographer who knew how easily the medium’s romance gets misfiled as engineering: lenses as status, specs as identity, technique as a substitute for seeing. “Look at lots of exhibitions and books” isn’t quaint mentorship; it’s a directive to build taste through contact with other people’s decisions - framing, sequencing, scale, silence. In other words: train your judgment, not your shopping cart.

The line’s quiet provocation is the demotion of the camera from sacred object to mere conduit. Godwin isn’t anti-technology so much as suspicious of the way technical talk can anesthetize responsibility. If your image is dull, it’s comforting to blame the sensor, the light meter, the wrong film stock. Her insistence - “Photography is about images” - yanks the burden back where it belongs: on meaning, composition, timing, and what you chose to include or exclude.

Context matters. Godwin made austere, politically alert landscapes in Britain, photographing places where beauty and damage coexist: contested countryside, human intrusion, environmental loss. That work doesn’t depend on a fetishized tool; it depends on attention and intent. The subtext is almost moral: if you care about what you’re looking at, you’ll stop using technical minutiae as camouflage. Images, not apparatus, are what survive.