'Vanishing Dorset', by George Wright (2008)

One of the hazards of the COVID restrictions, like drinking too much or putting on what the Germans call coronaspeck, is (for me) buying books. I have one on the way and may, depending what my bank account looks like when I check, be buying more later on. One of them has been George Wright's 2008 volume of photographs, Vanishing Dorset. 

'In 1983', he says, 'I went to live in an old farmhouse, up a potholed track, over a flooding stream, in a remote corner of West Dorset'. It was a wonderful place for Wright to retreat to from his globetrotting life as a photographer. Eventually, though, everything changed: 'when the newly formed village hall committee decided against allowing live music, I realised ... it was time to move on.'

But in the meantime he had documented some of the places he visited and people he met in the villages round about. The oldest of these images dates from 1980, and that's an outlier: most are from the 1990s or the second half of the 1980s. It's hardly a bygone age; it was when I wad doing most of my visiting of Dorset churches, barrows, and other historic sites. Yet Wright's photographs make this landscape appear antediluvian and its denizens barely like contemporary humans at all. It may just be the way they're dressed, these old boys in their cloth caps and drab overcoats, and ladies in stubby brown shoes and thick stockings, but they could be another race, albeit one no less individual than ours - in some ways, more so. Mr Chick of Rampisham used to serenade his pigs, shirtless, on an electronic organ. They were, apparently, very fond of 'Fly Me to the Moon'. These characters move through a backdrop of derelict farms and impractical cottages. The chaps at James Foote the forage merchants at Dorchester look very little different from the sort of Edwardian shopholders you see in photographs, standing outside their stores. Wright keeps the most elegaic photo to last: the Trysting Tree at Wytherston, in one 1986 shot proud and upright and carved with initials and hearts, and opposite it in 2008 lopped and segmented, lying by the road. Things do change. 

West Bay in 1986 - just three years before my dad's photograph here.