“I am a photographer and writer with 16 years experience of documentary and long-term reportage projects. In 2008, whilst working on a book called Wild Swim with writer Kate Rew, I photographed countryside from the Outer Hebrides to the Isles of Scilly and found that my own vocabulary for landscape was woefully inadequate. This realization led me to start collecting words for landscape features, words like jackstraw, zawn, clitter and logan, swash, cowbelly, hum and corrie, spinney, karst and tor.
I’m going to spend a year photographing examples of British landscape features described by these and around a hundred other words. This project will combine photography, text and crowd-sourced information to generate the first ever glossary of the British landscape.
The Landreader Project encompasses geology, ecology, geography and topography but treats these distinctions lightly, drawing equally from science, vernacular and lore to present an exploration of landscape as it is experienced. The richness and depth of the English language
is apparent in the lexicon of the British landscape and so this work is also a study of words – colloquial, scientific, prosaic and poetic.
By investigating the interplay between language and landscape, this work will raise questions about our relationship with the environment and the changes that this relationship has undergone. The naming of landscape features was a driver of language development; ever
since humans have communicated, they have communicated about their surroundings. Our increasingly urbanized lives and the resulting loss of countryside knowledge means that a large part of this communication has become vestigial and many of the words I’ve collected have fallen into obscurity. In general we no longer need to be able to describe the landscape with …”
See on www.thelandreader.com
📚 Glossarissimo! 