Alex Boyd

“The unsurpassable strangeness of the island resides in the chasmic gulf between the naturally evolved and the negligently created, between Scarp and scrap, between the sublime and the substandard.” - Jonathan Meades Writer, journalist and film-maker Jonathan Meades and photographer Alex Boyd present a unique exploration of 'The Isle of Rust', better known as Lewis and Harris. A decade on from Meades' landmark series 'Off Kilter', described by The Telegraph as 'a masterpiece', Boyd returns to the island, spending two years documenting the stunning landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, a strange, sometimes rusty paradise. Alongside Meades' insightful observations and explorations of the island, Boyd’s photography captures the rugged and austere beauty of the place, from the bays and mountains of Harris, to the moorland shacks of Lewis.

The Land of Maybe is a landmark project documenting the Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the North Atlantic, by land, sea and air. Taking its name from an old Scottish name for the islands, the project has taken place over several years and journeys, and attempts to explore the lives of the people who live in this remote landscape.

Rising out of the depths of the North Atlantic, the great cathedral-like sea stacks of Stac Lee and Stac an Armin and the jagged outlines of the islands of Hirta, Dùn, Levenish, Borerary and Soay make up one of the most famous groups of islands in the world, the archipelago of St Kilda. The names we have given to the islands reflect our own impressions of a place which in the minds of many lie far off in the west, 100 miles distant from mainland Scotland, surrounded by the treacherous waters of the North Atlantic. From ‘Britain’s Loneliest Islands’ to the ‘Islands at the Edge of the World’, the archipelago is often considered to be an outlier both physically and culturally from the British Isles, a place where a separate, supposedly more basic existence took place in an environment whose stark natural beauty is matched by its harsh and unforgiving location.

This collection is born from a project undertaken by photographer Alex Boyd over the course of many return visits to St Kilda over several years. The collection aims to give a complete and well-rounded portrayal of the islands, avoiding over-romanticising St Kilda and its inhabitants. Appearing here in full colour, Boyd’s photography captures the rugged beauty and the narrative of these fascinating islands.

The least important man was a boy in the 1970s. He remembers clubhouses, plastic soldiers, swimming lessons, rocket launches, a grandfather's letters from World War I. Those days are long gone, however: now the least important man is grown up. He lives in the city. He suffers endless rush hours, he dreams of other places, he drinks cheap coffee and crosses streets and sees explosions on the TV news. But through it all he's still thinking about that old life, and wondering what it meant, and asking in his quiet way how he might reconcile two such transient worlds with each other. The Least Important Man is the second collection from Gerald Lampert Prize-winning poet Alex Boyd: sober, self-sacrificing, and handsome, it's a book for those who want poetry to reassert its dignity and authority in everyday life. Alex Boyd is the author of Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications 2007) and the winner of the Gerald Lampert Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.