An Extremely Un-get-atable Place
An Extremely Un-get-atable Place, is a lyrical exploration and re-imagining of the time that George Orwell spent at Barnhill, the remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides in Scotland, where between 1946 - 1949 he lived and wrote his classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The work is about hope, about finding joy in the small things in life and believing in a better future in a world of political turmoil.
In 2023 I was invited to stay at Barnhill – 8 miles from the nearest road and almost unchanged since the time Orwell lived there. The house was Orwell’s escape. His place of hope, a place of peace & calm where he could build a future.
Orwell was dying, but after the untimely death of his wife, Eileen, he was determined to cling on to life to maintain hope and belief in the future, if not for him then for their son and for humanity. He believed in a better future and counsels us against tyrants.
He planted trees, grew vegetables, fished, kept chickens & had visitors galore. His diaries & letters are full of plans for the future.
In a similarly fractious time in world affairs, I too escaped. I was invited to stay at the house and there I made a series of landscape and still life images with my large format 10x8 field camera – the negatives then printed as hand-made silver gelatin prints and toned in strong tea in homage to Orwell’s famous obsession.
The photographs are presented alongside extracts from Orwell's diaries & letters that he wrote during his life on the island.
An Extremely Un-get-atable Place is published by GOST Books, 2025 and available to purchase here - it is the first book of ‘An Island Trilogy’ – three monographs to be published over the next two years all made in the Scottish Islands.
Books and publications
Published by GOST Books in 2025, An Extremely Un-get-atable Place is printed in beautiful tri-tone, the photographs interspersed with extracts from Orwell’s letters and diaries written on Jura and a special 8-page section which reproduces his original annotated and handwritten manuscript for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Signed copies available here
