The Photographers' Gallery London: Viewpoints – Photography and Landscape: Guy Moreton – Jacquetta Hawkes

Jacquetta Hawkes’s move to the Isle of Wight in 1953, with her husband, the writer J B Priestley after the publication of her acclaimed book 'A Land', was in many ways a retreat that allowed her the space and time to be absorbed into the lyrical and atmospheric littoral landscape of this island across the Solent from Southampton. It was here that she wrote the poetic script for the film Figures in a Landscape about Barbara Hepworth, excavated the Neolithic Longstone in 1956, walked along the cliffs and downs, and took evening swims with friends, including Iris Murdoch (The Sea, the Sea 1978). My interest in the expanded narrative of Romantic Moderns (Alexandra Harris, 2010) is embodied in the idea of landscape as a figurative, and powerfully intellectual phenomena, shared critically across and within culture. For Hawkes, as for Nan Shepherd and Ludwig Wittgenstein, it was the topography of thought that was shaped by the image – as much as the knowledge – of the underlying geology.