An Extremely Un-get-atable Place

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Now published (November 2025)! See below.

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A proposed photographic tribute to George Orwell’s home at Barnhill on the Scottish island of Jura is looking for supporters. While this is not an Orwell Society venture the project has the approval of both Richard Blair, son of George Orwell and Patron of the Orwell Society, and our Chair, Quentin Kopp.

An Extremely Un-get-atable Place is the title of the work by Craig Easton.

Craig describes the project in this way:

…  a lyrical re-imagining of the time that George Orwell spent at Barnhill, the remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura, where he lived and wrote between 1946 and his death in 1950. It was here, after the untimely death of his wife Eileen, and the turmoil of the Second World War, that he chose to start a new life with his young son, Richard. And it was here that he carved out the time to write his great dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four – an extraordinary gift and a dire warning of the dangers of totalitarianism and political despotism, as prescient today as it was prophetic seventy-five years ago.

Working with a 1952 large-format wooden plate camera, the resulting landscape and still life photographs are printed in the darkroom then toned with strong tea in homage to Orwell’s famous love of the drink. In this beautiful large-scale art book they are presented alongside quotes from Orwell’s letters and diaries celebrating the joy of nature and the simple pleasures that offer us all hope in challenging times.

Craig took inspiration from George Orwell’s essay ‘Thoughts on the common toad’:

“Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, 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?”

“I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.”

And says:

“I was invited to stay at Barnhill – almost untouched since Orwell’s time – and found the place both challenging and restorative, an opportunity to regroup and refocus. For me, the work I made there is about hope, a chance to find joy in the small things; the landscape, the weather (yes, even the Scottish weather in February!), the aesthetics of wind-blown trees or chipped teapots. For days and days I walked and looked and photographed, then spent the night by the fireside imagining Orwell’s life there in the 1940s, reading and sipping some fine Jura whisky that the owners had kindly left for me.”

The book will be published in early Autumn 2025 and a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign offers pre-orders of signed copies at a discounted price plus an opportunity to purchase limited edition prints at exclusive non-gallery prices.

Now published (November 2025).

Order here: www.craigeaston.com 

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Craig Easton was a winner of Photographer of the Year at the SONY World Photography Awards in 2021 and The Arnold Newman Prize for Portraiture in 2023. He was recognised with the award of an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, and at The Orwell Awards in 2022 was given a special prize for his ‘Exposing Britain’s Social Evils’ for his work Thatcher’s Children.
His work is exhibited and collected widely and he has published three monographs:

Fisherwomen, Ten O’Clock Books, 2021
Bank Top, GOST Books, 2022
Thatcher’s Children, GOST Books, 2023