Everything remains 3, from the series BEYOND THIS POINT

Photographer Lynne Roberts-Goodwin is sensitive to the way the camera has conditioned and transformed the way we see the world. With a practice that is preoccupied with the language of landscape imagery, Roberts-Goodwin considers the impacts of human presence and intervention in the way geography is partitioned and traversed.

From the series BEYOND THIS POINT, these photographs were made during an expedition that retraced the journeys of the famous 18th century daredevil balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi over the British Isles, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Also travelling in a balloon, Roberts-Goodwin photographed the land from above, thereby abandoning the horizon as the determining structuring device of a landscape image. During the journey, Roberts-Goodwin became interested in the mechanics of flight itself. One of the first apparatus that allowed us to traverse great distances, the hot air balloon compressed our understanding of space and transformed how we see the world around us. We no longer had to simply move through a landscape to travel, we could move over it. This resulted in a profound perspectival shift that would later extend into the experiential revolution of the airplane as well as space travel. The impact of ‘the aerial view’ would have long standing consequences for our understanding of our world and environment. We can look to the connection between the environmental movements of the 1970s and the first colour photographs of the world from outer space as a testament to this fact. This history underwrites Roberts-Goodwin’s interest in the ‘view from above’ in this body of work.

During the course of this project, and the ongoing wrestling with the balloon, Lynne became absorbed by the contraption itself, seeing the balloon not simply as means of transport but as a shape shifter. Turning her camera away from the ground below and up into the billowing sails, she made new landscapes. The photographs produced are dynamic motion studies that confound our understanding of scale and depth. These are topographies made of textiles. They tug at our desire to locate ourselves in an image and teeter towards abstraction. They serve as an approach to landscape photography that turns away from the site and rests its gaze on the means of movement; the human invention that has utterly transformed modes of occupation. Ever sensitive to the impacts of human intrusion into the natural world, here Roberts-Goodwin focuses her lens on the device itself. On the instrument of intervention