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Keith Beven
Keith Beven is Emeritus Professor of Hydrology at Lancaster University where he has worked for over 30 years. He has published many academic papers and books on the study and computer modelling of hydrological processes. Since the 1990s he has used mostly 120 film cameras, from 6x6 to 6x17, and more recently Fuji X cameras when travelling light. He has recently produced a second book of images of water called “Panta Rhei – Everything Flows” in support of the charity WaterAid that can be ordered from his website.
As has been the case with nearly all other End frame recommendations, having been invited to choose an image to present in this series, I found it extremely difficult to make a choice. In previous recent articles for On Landscape I have already mentioned one of my favourite Ansel Adams images, and my favourite LPOTY winning photograph of Mark Littlejohn. Many others came to mind, particularly Michael Kenna, John Sexton and Fay Godwin, but I decided to go with an image that has been hanging on my wall for quite some time now: Full Moon over Mayo by Paul Kenny. Paul’s work should be known to many of the readers of On Landscape by now, not least because of his talk given at the last Meeting of Minds conference in 2018.
I was fortunate to meet Paul at an early stage in his photographic career as the result of an exhibition in Lancaster, close to where he lived at that time in Churchtown. I bought one of his prints then (Blackstone - Bright Water, 1992), when he was still working with a camera, and we stayed in regular contact. We also managed to organise an artist-in-residence position with the Environment Centre at Lancaster University, soon after it was formed. That produced an interesting body of work, including some images of waste items from the laboratory being taken back out and photographed in the environment. Later Paul started to exhibit the prints he had made produced in other ways than through a camera, and I was immediately struck by the nature and intensity of these images. That was when I bought a copy of Full Moon over Mayo. It has been on the wall ever since.