Robin Friend captures the dual nature of Britain’s countryside

Robin Friend’s newly released book, Bastard Countryside, is the unplanned result of 15 years of photographing the British landscape. When Friend – a Wallpaper* contributor – started taking the large-format pictures that appear on the book’s pages, he was still an undergraduate at Plymouth University.
There are also photographs taken later, when he moved to London, where he completed an MA at the Royal College of Art. It was at the RCA that he met Robert MacFarlane, the British writer who has revived interest in writing about the landscape in his books and essays. Macfarlane introduced Friend to Victor Hugo’s contemplation of a ‘bastard countryside’, a place between urban and rural, and has contributed an essay to the book.
Bastard Countryside looks outwards at a changing landscape, but it is also a personal documentation, of a person maturing as an artist and as a man, and in his vision of the world through his camera. For Friend, who was born in London but grew up in Australia before moving back, this dual perspective also reveals itself in an insider-outsider view, the imprint of culture on nature. Friend treats Britain’s creeks and canals, flora and fauna, industrial sites and scrap yards, with the equal curiosity and distance of a foreign eye.
There are dramatic, monumental scenes – a shipwreck, a beached whale – that touch on themes of death and human destruction. Other images surprise with unexpected beauty: piles of scrap waste suddenly look like magnificent sculptures. There are juxtapositions that provoke laughter, such as his snapshots of scarecrows. Friend’s understanding of colour and light brings a surreal kind of magic: his pictures of satellite dishes rusting in fields of lavender, or pinkish bales of hay piled high, look exotic to a native.
Like a long line of landscape painters who have sat out in the teeth of the weather, Friend, with his cumbersome large-format camera, has abseiled and climbed (and even slept on shipwreck) to take his photographs. Some are carefully coordinated shoots while others are spontaneous sightings. This physical engagement with the landscape is as much part of the work: we look at it from different angles, above, below, up-close and from afar.
Juxtaposing the natural and the manmade, pollution and its victims, wreckage and renewal, Bastard Countryside constitutes ‘an archive of a country’s margins during an era of austerity and marginalisation’, as MacFarlane writes in his essay. This is not a depiction of pastoral perfection but an ode to a tangled, snuggle-toothed terrain whose charm isn’t obvious but has been overlooked.
INFORMATION
Bastard Countryside, £40, published by Loose Joints. The book launches at Donlon Books in East London on 6 December, from 6.30-8.30pm. For more information, visit Robin Friend’s website
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
Charlotte Jansen is a journalist and the author of two books on photography, Girl on Girl (2017) and Photography Now (2021). She is commissioning editor at Elephant magazine and has written on contemporary art and culture for The Guardian, the Financial Times, ELLE, the British Journal of Photography, Frieze and Artsy. Jansen is also presenter of Dior Talks podcast series, The Female Gaze.
-
Ferrari hopes to recapture the grand tourer crown with the striking new Ferrari Amalfi
The new Ferrari Amalfi coasts into view, a classically beautifully V8-powered GT that features a host of upgrades to aesthetics and tech within a minimal, uncluttered silhouette
-
Puiforcat brings something new to the table with a wooden cutlery set
Jasper Morrison's collection for Puiforcat features cherry wood cutlery finished with fuki-urushi lacquering, a first foray into wood for the silverware company
-
A clifftop Rethymno house tells a story, framing views as far as the Libyan Sea
This house in Rethymno on the Greek island of Crete, designed by architects Gkotsis Serafimidou, is rich in local and natural materials – an oasis at which to disconnect
-
We are all fetishists, says Anastasia Fedorova in her new book, which takes a deep dive into kink
In ‘Second Skin’, writer and curator Fedorova takes a tour through the materials, objects and power dynamics we have fetishised
-
The gayest love story ever told: Jeremy Atherton Lin's memoir is a tribute to home
In 'Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told', Jeremy Atherton Lin mixes memoir with a historical deep-dive into marriage equlaity
-
The glory years of the Cannes Film Festival are captured in a new photo book
‘Cannes’ by Derek Ridgers looks back on the photographer's time at the Cannes Film Festival between 1984 and 1996
-
Taschen’s sexy record covers are hitting all the right notes
Taschen has been through 50 years of album art for its latest tome, ‘Sexy Record Covers’
-
‘Dressed to Impress’ captures the vivid world of everyday fashion in the 1950s and 1960s
A new photography book from The Anonymous Project showcases its subjects when they’re dressed for best, posing for events and celebrations unknown
-
Daniel Arsham’s new monograph collates the works of the auto-obsessed American artist
‘Arsham Motorsport’ is two volumes of inspiration, process and work, charting artist Daniel Arsham’s oeuvre inspired by the icons and forms of the automotive industry
-
Era-defining photographer David Bailey guides us through the 1980s in a new tome not short of shoulder pads and lycra
From Yves Saint Laurent to Princess Diana, London photographer David Bailey dives into his 1980s archive in a new book by Taschen
-
Inside Joan Didion’s unseen diary of personal relationships and post-therapy notes
A newly discovered diary by Joan Didion is soon to be published. Titled 'Notes to John', the journal documents her relationship with her daughter, husband, alcoholism, and depression