“a vision par excellence of our synthetic ‘modern nature’– produced by assemblage and entanglement rather than purity and distinction”. Contained within Friend’s photographs are “hard questions […] about what kinds of landscape one might wish either to pass through or to live in; about what versions of ‘modern nature’ might be worth fighting for, and why.”
Robert MacFarlane
An interesting and edgy take on the zone between the urban and rural.
These edgelands have been written about in numerous other books before now, including the work of Marion Shoard, and a book, also called 'Edgelands' by Michael Simmons-Roberts and Paul Farley, along with Iain Sinclair's 'London Orbital'.
These are manipulated images by Roger Friend, who refers to the "septic" rather than the sceptred isle....
“We romanticise the landscape, we think of it as pastoral, beautiful, like a painting by Constable, a place where you go and sit down and have a picnic,” he explains. “But actually that’s more fake than what the Bastard Countryside is for me; that’s the truer representation of the British landscape.”
The images are collected in an excellent-looking book called 'Bastard Countryside' by Roger Friend.
Like all books on landscape (it seems) it has an introduction by Robert MacFarlane.
It's also a way in to the Huck Magazine website, and @huckmagazine Twitter feed which has a range of excellent articles and features which could be called Cultural Geography. There are many excellent stories such as this one on migrants.
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