Daily Inspiration Quote by Fay Godwin

“Maybe” does a lot of work here. Fay Godwin, celebrated for her bracing, unsentimental views of the British landscape, isn’t tossing off uncertainty so much as refusing the puffed-up authority photographers are often expected to perform. The line reads like a shrug, but it’s a pointed one: an artist declining to turn a hard-won aesthetic conviction into dogma.

In the late 20th century, color photography was becoming the default language of commercial modernity, tied to advertising gloss and the promise of “realism.” Godwin’s landscapes push in the opposite direction. Black and white isn’t a nostalgic filter; it’s a discipline. It strips the scene down to structure: weather, texture, tonal gradation, the blunt geometry of field boundaries and stone. In a country where “nature” is frequently a managed argument - fenced, owned, contested - monochrome becomes a way to read land as evidence rather than postcard.

The subtext is also about power: the camera’s power to beautify, to flatter, to distract. Color can seduce; black and white can insist. Godwin’s “I don’t know” is a quiet defense against that seduction, an admission that the medium is never neutral and that certainty can be its own kind of self-mythology. She’s not claiming black and white is truer; she’s suggesting it might be harder to lie with, especially when the subject is a landscape already thick with national stories.