Roger Cox - The Isle of Rust (Review)

Photography book of the year (2019)


Having produced a stunning, warts-and-all portrait of the island of St Kilda in 2017, which gave as much prominence to utilitarian MOD structures as it did to the picturesque abandoned houses of Village Bay, in his latest book, Isle of Rust (Luath), Alex Boyd turns his lens on Lewis and Harris.

Inspired by Jonathan Meades’ essay of the same name, in which he muses “whoever would have thought that the last remaining bastion of fundamental Calvinism would become the site of a scrap cult,” Boyd once again goes in search of a representative mixture of the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

There are sweeping island vistas here, sure – Storm Approaching the Valtos Peninsular, Lewis, for example, is a spectacular study in contrast as a huge black cloud threatens to envelop a peaceful, sunlit patch of farmland – but for every picture-postcard view, there are three or four images of decay: cars and buses left to rust out in the open; boats and bits of boats slowly disintegrating along the tideline; and multitudinous ruined crofts with rusting corrugated iron roofs.

This isn’t ugliness for the sake of it, however. Some of Boyd’s rust pictures – Rusted Bicycle, Bragar, Lewis, for example, in which the handlebars of a child’s bike poke up out of a bog like some strange, alien totem pole – are as aesthetically pleasing as any of his more conventional landscapes.

What he’s aiming for, I think, is simply a degree of honesty. Boyd is an equal opportunities snapper, one who refuses to discriminate based on conventional ideas of what is “worth” photographing and what is not.

The original article can be read here