For his latest project, Scottish photographer Craig Easton retraced George Orwell’s years on Jura, the remote Hebridean island where the author wrote his dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four.
An Extremely Un-get-able Place is a ‘lyrical re-imagining’ of the time Orwell spent on Jura, with images of wild landscapes, the farmhouse in which he lived, and still lifes, interspersed with letters and diaries.
Discussing the idea behind the work, Easton says: ‘I’d been thinking about Orwell and about the question: how do we respond to a world in chaos, with all the political upheaval that’s going on and the threat of authoritarianism? I knew he had gone there for reasons other than why people think. People have an image of Orwell going to the arse-end of nowhere, this angst-ridden writer who was dying, and he went to write this dystopian novel.
‘What he did is go there to carve out some creative freedom and time so he could write. He was dying of TB, and he knew he was dying, but he was still determined to cling on to hope and enjoy the small things in life. He also went to plant a garden. I found myself thinking, “I’m in a very similar place to that”’.
Read Craig Easton’s full interview with Graeme Green in our latest issue (B+W 312) and order An Extremely Un-get-able Place, published by GOST, via craigeaston.com.