‘I call this a work of imagination,’ says Craig Easton as we chat over Teams. ‘I’m imagining his life there.’ The photographer is talking of the novelist, critic, essayist – and gardener – George Orwell, whose time on the Inner Hebridean of Jura Easton has used as inspiration for his latest book, the crowdfunded An Extremely Un-get-atable Place.

Easton is known for his political work such as Thatcher’s Children – a study of three generations of the same family and the impact of poverty – and Bank Top – an area of Blackburn, which was described by BBC Panorama as the most segregated town in Britain. So how did these bodies of work lead him to the concept for a book of large-format landscape images inspired by Orwell? ‘Like everybody else, I read Orwell as a teenager,’ he explains. ‘Given the current global situation, I was reading his work again. And after having done Thatcher’s Children and Bank Top, which were both very political pieces of work, I was very conscious of how much division there is in the world, and Orwell wrote about that.’

Therefore, while these evocative and lyrical black & white landscape images are a distinct step away from his projects of recent years, there remains a political undercurrent. ‘Orwell also looked for hope,’ he says, ‘and I was asking myself how we can respond in the current situation. We can either get more and more angry, or we can try to find a way through it and try to be the change we want to be. So this was an opportunity for me to slow down and try to go back to my love of photography as opposed to making work that I was angry about all the time.’

The road to Barnhill

Orwell lived on Jura for the last years of his life, from 1946 until January 1949, when he was forced to leave because of the tuberculosis that would eventually be the cause of his death a year later. He was accompanied there by his sister Avril, his housekeeper Susan, and his adopted son Richard. Orwell’s wife, Eileen Blair, nee O’Shaughnessy, had died in 1945, less than a year after the couple had adopted Richard. It was on Jura, in a remote house called Barnhill, which can still be found several miles down a private single-track road, that Orwell wrote 1984 (and it was also here that he and Richard would come close to drowning in the notorious Corryvreckan whirlpool).

‘The family that rented Barnhill to Orwell [the Fletchers] still owns it today,’ says Easton, ‘and it’s not really been touched since he died.’ There’s no mains electricity, the small fridge is gas-powered and any heat comes from a coal-fired stove. ‘If you went to the top of the hill, you might occasionally get a phone signal, but in any case the electricity was so weak, it would take 48 hours to charge a phone.’

It was a characteristically cold and wet February when Easton travelled to the island. And so it was he found himself absorbing the details of Barnhill – and while the chipped teapot he photographed may not have been the same one in which Orwell brewed his ‘Nice Cup of Tea’, the stair carpet is frayed from his footsteps and, essentially, the Jura Orwell saw is the same one that Easton tramped across some 75 years later. ‘I wasn’t trying to do some kind of step-by-step, saying “this is what he did, and this is where he went”, but I wanted to just respond, and enjoy looking at, say, the light falling across the sea or the view across the Corryvreckan,’ he explains.

Evolution of ideas

Because the work was made on film, Easton didn’t always realise at the time of shooting which were his ‘breakthrough’ images – the ones that constituted a lightbulb moment. ‘In hindsight there are two or three that stand out,’ he says, ‘but at the time I wasn’t so sure. The picture of the house with the tree is the signature picture of the book, in a sense. I knew at the time that I was playing with it in a certain way, with the tree being out of focus in the corner, and that allowed me the freedom to start playing with focus as opposed to making straight landscapes.’

Towards the end of his time on the island, Easton found himself shooting in a more abstract fashion – through a rain-soaked window or into an ethereal, soft view of mist. ‘Suddenly, these sorts of images made sense within the context of the rest of the work,’ he explains. ‘But if I’d shot those at the beginning, you’d think “God, what the hell’s that?” But what I’m really trying to do is evoke the atmosphere or feelings Orwell must have had when he was there, because the reason I went there is the same reason he went there – to try to make sense of these times of terrible turmoil.’

Of course, Orwell wouldn’t have been reflecting only on the global tumult of the time, but also his inner battles. He knew he was dying of TB, and at one point had to leave for several months to receive treatment. Despite this, however, he planned out gardens, and planted fruit trees and flowers, vegetables and shrubs. And, shortly before moving to Jura, he wrote his essay Notes on a Common Toad, which is quoted at the beginning of An Extremely Un-get-atable Place: ‘…is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money?’

Finding optimism

Given the gardens Orwell planned (diagrams of which are reproduced in the book), I put it to Easton that gardeners are often considered to be the ultimate optimists. They sow seeds, not knowing whether they will germinate, and they plant bulbs in autumn, assuming they’ll still be around to see the flowers in all their glory the following spring. He agrees, but expands the point further. ‘I think that optimism is also true of photographers and sculptors and painters and writers – it’s about being compelled to make something. And when you’ve made something, it makes you feel better or gives you a greater understanding.’

The joy of shooting on film, for Easton, is that the creative process continues into the darkroom, where the real magic can often happen. ‘It’s a unique experience, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘There just isn’t anything like it.’

The first step in the – breathtakingly expensive – process (a 50-sheet box of 20x24in Ilford Multigrade Warmtone now costs the best part of £600) is for Easton to make 10x8in contact prints. Once he’s got these just as he wants them, he makes a series of 20x24in prints in editions of five. What stands out about this project, however, is the nod towards Orwell’s favourite beverage – because each print is carefully toned in tea. I ask Easton how loyal he was to Orwell in his investigations about which had the most pleasing effect. Is it Indian? ‘Ceylonese’? No, as it turns out. ‘Oh, I experimented with all sorts,’ he says, smiling, ‘and I discovered that the cheapest, crappiest, most tanniny tea is the best. No, they’re not toned in lapsang souchong – they’re toned very, very, very strong tea. I think there are about 16 teabags in a litre or thereabouts. He’d be horrified.’

Fascinatingly, Easton was given permission by the Orwell Foundation to reproduce the first eight pages from the original manuscript of 1984. With these, we are given the opportunity to see Orwell’s crossings-out – entire paragraphs often struck through – and the rewrites in his own handwriting. (Who knew, for example, that the famous first line originally referred to radios striking 13 and not clocks?) ‘How much he struggled,’ Easton ponders. ‘He sat in bed with TB and he typed that bloody thing out on his typewriter. Then he crossed it all out and wrote over it and reworked it and re-worked it. And that’s what we do [when we create]. When I talk to students, I tell them it’s not about being inspired – it’s about bloody hard work. I saw that manuscript and in those simple few pages… that’s exactly the process of making any kind of art.’

During our interview, Easton is waiting for his doorbell to ring, which will herald the arrival of his first printed copy of the book. How does he reflect on the work and his time on Jura, now that the final piece of the project is about to be in his hands? ‘I wanted to try and understand how Orwell managed to marry this political concern for the future with a sense of hope and a sense of belief in renewal. What came out of [my work] was a much greater understanding of his love of nature and how passionate he was. He wasn’t just this guy who’s really angry at the world and writing these angry books. Actually, he’s passionate about family and hope and future and roses and fruit trees and, you know, toads.’

Perhaps the greatest symbol of hope lies in the image that remains uncaptured. More than 75 years after Orwell planted them, his azaleas continue to thrive in the gardens of Barnhill. ‘My one regret is that I didn’t return to Jura in June or July to photograph them,’ Easton says. Orwell never returned – but I have no doubt that one day Easton will.

Equipment

Most of the work in An Extremely Un-getatable Place was shot on a 1952 Deardorff V10 8x10in field camera, using either a 240mm or a 300mm lens. For days when he walked up to 15 miles, Easton carried a Mamiya 7 with 65mm, 80mm and 150mm lenses.

He has a long-standing relationship with Ilford and uses mostly HP5 and FP4 film. The prints are made on Ilford Multigrade fibre-based paper then toned in strong tea. ‘It’s been a trial-and-error process to get the tone right,’ says Easton, ‘and it is frustrating at times when you’ve made a beautiful print then wreck it in the tea, but it’s all part of the joy of getting back to a hand-made process that feels appropriate for the work.’

An Extremely Un-get-atable Place (named after Orwell’s description of Jura), with text by Richard Blair, is published by GOST Books, 100pp, 58 images, hardback,

ISBN 978-1-80598-014-8, £50. Signed copies can be bought from Craig Easton’s website at www.craigeaston.com.

Related reading

• The Essential Guide to Darkroom Printing
• How to master darkroom toning
• Take your best ever street photos

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