The road is paved with good intentions

I set out to keep a regular flow of photos on this blog but events have conspired against me.

Today's picture is a companion to 'Lost Horizons.' Both were taken at the same event, a 'Fayre', (dis) organised by a now defunct environmental trust, who were later dumped, unceremoniously, by their parent organisation, Groundwork.

The event was ambitiously spread over an area the size of half a dozen football pitches. The mist came down, the local radio station's helicopter was grounded and those few who did turn out to participate were simply lost in the empty space.

To me it summed up the vacuous nature of the 'environmental regeneration' that was taking place, a bandwagon that minority political organisations were riding to death, and still are.

The stall in this image is fundraising for the 'Nationalist' Mebyon Kernow, a political organisation with an irrational separatist agenda.

It is not surprising that, with the introduction of Regional Government, there are genuine fears of a loss of identity among some communities. With respect to the 'environment' the fear raised by 'regeneration' is that even the landscape will lose its identity. A process the artist Andrew Lanyon calls "The Surreyfication of Cornwall".

Lost Horizons

I do not want this blog to become an online diary, a sort of, Home Truths confessional. It is meant to be a place for my photographs to be seen together with the occasional, brief, contextual comment.

Disliking the constraints of sponsorship, I am a fiercely independent photographer in the documentary/reportage style, adding the occasional whimsical and pictorial image just for good measure.

The main body of my later work is about a 'sense of place', documenting events in and around where I live and along a valley, exploited for its mineral wealth, for hundreds, and probably, thousands of years.

This work is not meant to be definitive, it is my very personal relationship with a landscape, in which I spent my adolescence and where, with occasional bursts of enthusiasm, I have wandered with my camera for the past two decades.

There have been many changes to the area, not all sympathetic, traditional industries have declined and the demands of a growing local population have put serious pressure on both rare habitats and important industrial archaeology.

The environment may be unique but the story of this place will be familiar to many.

Peter Dewhurst