Isle of Rust
Isle of Rust
Alex Boyd
ISBN: Hardback - 9781913025007; Paperback - 9781804250822
Binding: hardback and paperback
Hardback Out of Stock; Paperback In Stock
Shortlisted for the Favourite Scottish Nature Photography Book at the Scottish Nature Photography Awards 2020.
Here, at the north-westernmost periphery of Europe is what feels like a presage of the future, the distant future, the furthest future, after which there’ll be no future at all. This is the Isle of Rust – known, too, as Lewis and Harris. It is a blueprint, a working model of the day which will have no tomorrow. Jonathan Meades
Isle of Rust not only refers to the countless corroding tractors, weaving sheds and other visible signs of human settlement but also to the colours of the land: the reds of deergrass and the purple moor grass which make up so much of the moorland. It is a place of great contrast in both light and land, from the largely flat peatlands of Lewis, where the majority of islanders make their home, to the mountains of Harris. Alex Boyd
It’d be easy to mistake these landscapes for ruins. Rust is not ruin. There is in Meades-Boyd some kind of shared attention to the detritus of human life. They open their eyes to the humanity that inheres in what outlasts people’s lives. Dan Hicks
Reviews:
Boyd is an equal opportunities snapper, one who refuses to discriminate based on conventional ideas of what is ‘worth’ photographing and what is not.ROGER COX, The Scotsman
An a ectionate but by no means nostalgic or romanticised view of one of Europe’s furthest edges. JOHN McDOUGALL, Bella Caledonia
Praise for St Kilda: The Silent Islands
Alex Boyd’s images represent a major addition to the tradition of modern landscape photography. ROBERT MacFARLANE
Alex Boyd captures the natural beauty magnificently, while his studies of radar stations and other signs of the islands’ military presence, reveal another side to this captivating place. THE ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY