Fay Godwin, who has died aged 74, was an outstanding landscape photographer, in line of succession to Edwin Smith, Bill Brandt and Ray Moore. The book for which she will be most remembered is Land (Heinemann, 1985).
Designed by Ken Garland, it is stylish in the classic mode, but what sets Land apart is the care that she gave to the combining and sequencing of its pictures. Working with contact prints on a board, she put together a picture of Britain as ancient terrain - stony, windswept and generally worn down by the elements.
At that time the model was Robert Frank's dystopian account, The Americans (1959). In 1975 Josef Koudelka contributed Gypsies, a vision of the family of man fallen on very hard times.
Godwin's rendering was more lyrical, but a lot of the evidence in the pictures points to mediocre development and careless desecration. The book concludes with a set of what she called "stranded materials", L-shaped cement slabs used as sea defences at Pett Level, Sussex, where she had a house.
The slabs, with what look like eyeholes, seem to stare towards the sun: found versions of the Easter Island memorials.
She was born in Berlin, her father was a British diplomat and her mother an American painter. She was educated at nine schools and, in the 1950s, after working for a travel company, she went into publishing. In 1961 she married Tony Godwin, of Penguin Books. They separated in 1969, by which time she had begun her photography.
Her first book, co-written with JRL Anderson, was The Oldest Road: An Exploration Of The Ridgeway (Wildwood House, 1975). It was designed by Ken Garland and Associates, who also designed her other Wildwood books: The Drovers' Roads of Wales (written by Shirley Toulson, 1977) and Romney Marsh and the Royal Military Canal (written by Richard Ingrams, 1980).
In 1975 she took the pictures for The Oil Rush (written by Mervyn Jones, 1976, and published by Quartet).
The Garland-designed books, in a square format, are attractive items, but they are documentaries, sometimes murkily printed. The same was true of The Oil Rush, a thoroughgoing piece of reportage taken at Aberdeen and Peterhead, and on the North Sea oil rigs themselves. In a note in the book, she remarked that the pictures were taken during an August heat wave, and that several times she "was refused permission to make trips to rigs, platforms, pipelaying barges and other facilities, because I am a woman."
These early books, with their many pictures, represented publishers' attempts to cope with television, which was promising to make photographic documentary a thing of the past. From the 1970s onwards photographers had to look elsewhere to survive, and a preferred option was to turn to art.
Her entry into art proper came with Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence (Faber and Faber, 1979) with poems by Ted Hughes. Elmet, associated with the Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles. It fostered the industrial revolution in textiles, but, by the 1970s, when she went there, it had decayed to the point of looking like a figure for the end of the world.
This description may be unfair to Calderdale, but Remains of Elmet has to be understood as an invention in the apocalyptic style, which interested photographers in the 1970s (and which certainly informed Land). Resonantly printed by the Scolar Press, Ilkley, it looks like a thoroughly self-confident work of art, but it was assembled with difficulty, the pictures taken on camping trips with children in a Renault 4.
In fact, none of her early successes was easily come by, for they all entailed trips to the wilder part of Britain. During the 1950s she had severely damaged a knee in a skiing accident, and that was always a hindrance, although not one which she allowed get in her way, for she became president of the Ramblers' Association during the late 1980s.
There is one odd picture in Remains of Elmet of a spent cartridge case lying in long grass next to a pile of grouse droppings. It is an emblematic picture, and a pointer to the kind of imagery that would increasingly preoccupy her during the later, more radical, phase of her photography.
This culminated in Our Forbidden Land (Jonathan Cape, 1990). The Britain she had investigated for her 1970s guidebooks had alerted her to the destruction wrought, in particular, by road-building, military training, afforestation and development.
She liked ramshackle smallholdings, which were the work of individuals making do and getting by; she hated distant authority. Look at her essay, "Who Owns the Land?" (1994), 17th in Charter 88's Violations of Rights in Britain series. In the short term, she deplored how English Heritage and the National Trust "have copyrighted our heritage", and, in the long term, imagined "an Orwellian future".
She said she never made very much from publishing, despite 17 books. One way around the problem, she said, was to take a number of copies in lieu of a fee and sell them after lectures and workshops. Many people in her position would have gone into teaching - and then gone under. She remained independent to the end, and one outcome of this was Glassworks & Secret Lives (Stella Press, 1998), after an exhibition at the Warwick arts centre in 1995.
Photographers hardly ever switch format successfully, and for most of her working life she had taken pictures in black and white. The Glassworks series are in colour, and are of foliage - flowers and seed heads seen obscurely through screens and nets.
She is survived by her sons, Jeremy and Nick.
Fay Godwin, photographer, born February 17th, 1931; died May 27th, 2005