This is not a book of, or about, photography.  Rather, it is a portrait of an island archipelago, its history and culture, focused through the prism of one hundred physical, geographic, places, current and historical,  (including a few specific artefacts).  Nevertheless, it is clearly a work that is significant to me and my thinking about landscape as explored throughout this course and the medium of photography.

This is a book that I picked up at the Hexham Book Festival in April 2019 (only eighteen months ago but already a world away) after listening to a very engaging and entertaining talk by the author, Neil Oliver, who will be familiar to anyone who ever watches some of the better offerings on BBC 4 about archaeology, history, and topography.  As with many books that really interest me it took a while to work to the top of the waiting to be read pile and it was only last night that I finished it.  It was only last night that it struck me how relevant this book is to, and how much it resonates with, my ideas about landscape photography as they have developed over the course of this module.  It has been about three months that I have spent on this book, while reading other things in the interim as well, roughly a chapter an evening, so its import has had a little time to be felt and absorbed.  Which is perhaps why it has taken a while to come to the forefront of my consciousness, and for me to offer a note about it only now.

What has interested me throughout this course, and what I have endeavoured to explore, is the two-way traffic of how the environment is affected by the people who live within it and how they in their turn are affected by that environment.  The story that Neil Oliver tells, stretching back over nearly a million years to the earliest recorded hominids in this part of the world, exemplifies for me both aspects of this equation, but in particular how the specificities and peculiarities of the landscapes of these islands have played parts in shaping and determining who “we”, the British, are now.

Obviously, as I had already done much of the work for this module before I even picked up this book and settled down with it seriously, it has not consciously affected any of the work that I have made.  It nevertheless remains, if only in retrospect, important to me and that work (not to mention the benighted island archipelago upon which I live).  If nothing else it helps to offer some validation, albeit ex post facto, to what I have already done and the thinking behind my efforts.

Beyond that (and this is not a review!) it is well worth reading and thoroughly enjoyable in its own right.

Oliver, N, (2018).  The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places.  London:  Penguin

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