Uncertain States. Paper. Issue 17.
DAVID GEORGE.
David Georges photographs examines the possibility of pastoral in the contemporary British Landscape. (or arcadia) Pastoral can be defined as something that describes the countryside with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban or 'as an opposition between to modes of living.'(Frank Kermode)
Pastoral was originally, a highly stylised romantic art form that imagined some past rural ideal despoiled by modernity, creating a sense of loss in society for the purely fictitious world or, as Raymond Williams defines it....'myth functioning as memory'
On reflection, was the pastoral ideal beloved by all classes in that world of upheaval and industrial revolution or did it only exist for a certain strata of society, able, through wealth and inclination, to inhabit the rural ideal.
