Island Life: Photographs from the Martin Parr Foundation
Clive Landen
Born 1950
‘I always thought of landscape as a bit easy.’
Landen’s take on landscape is anything but romantic and distinctly uneasy. Familiar British Wildlife (1994) shows animals killed by traffic. Carefully composed, they take their titles from the Latin used by zoologists. Although reminiscent of still life paintings their brutalised subject matter challenges the nostalgia of the English rural idyll. For The Abyss series on foot and mouth disease, Landen borrowed the soft focus fog of landscape photography with the appearance of hand-tinting (acid greens and yellow) to depict piles of cow carcases. Landen taught on the Documentary Photography course at Newport from 1982-2013.
