You won’t read it in the captions, but there is a phrase that could justifiably appear under two of the pictures in Charlie Waite’s new exhibition in London next week: “Libya days before the revolution”.

Waite, one of Britain’s most renowned landscape photographers, was asked to visit Libya in January 2011 to compile a book about the country’s cultural treasures, from the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna to the Greek colony of Cyrene. (The images on this page, of the Libyan Sahara and a Tripoli mausoleum, were the result of that trip.) The approach came through an intermediary, who said the publisher didn’t want to be named but that Waite would be given a government guide and escorted to major sites. All went as promised during the three weeks he travelled the country . Waite flew home on February 16 – the eve of a revolution that culminated in the death of the leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

Soon afterwards, his apologetic intermediary was forced to reveal that his patron had been closely connected with the Gaddafi family, and that neither the book nor the balance of his fee would be forthcoming: “She said, 'As you can imagine, we’re not able to pay you the remainder because Libya is now in a state of civil war.’ ”

Had Waite’s exit from Libya not been planned in advance, it might be tempting to see it as instinctive, for his work is about as far from war as photography can get. Whether an image is from the Lake District or the Namib Desert, its overriding quality will be of an almost spiritual serenity.

His latest show, Silent Exchange, brings together images from the Eighties to some from a trip just a few weeks ago to Morocco and Tunisia. What unites them is a concentration on beauty; on what he has called “a thing made holy by the light falling on it”.



Highlights from a new exhibition at the National Theatre

Waite is baffled by much modern landscape photography and its preoccupation with the bleak and the gritty, and is struck by how lengthy captions are often needed to explain what drew the photographer. “A good photograph,” he has written, “is a received photograph, an exchange between you and the landscape in which – however unlikely this might seem – there is a form of dialogue… It is simply courtesy to allow the landscape to speak.”

He has spent his career encouraging others to listen equally attentively, with ventures such as the annual Landscape Photographer of the Year award, which he began in 2007 with his photographic tour company Light & Land, and with teach-ins on DVD and in print, including one for Telegraph Travel on making the most of a compact camera.

This week he returned from a cruise that took him to the Normandy beaches for the 70th anniversary of D-Day. There he had discussed with veterans how they might respond with photographs to the feelings aroused by the cemeteries that hold so many of their friends. Some were daunted initially, he says, by the technology in both their cameras and the hi-tech French war museums. “One of them said to me, 'I was more frightened by the re-creation in that cyclorama thing than I was on the day of the invasion itself.’ ”

Silent Exchange: The Landscape Photography of Charlie Waite will be in the Lyttelton Circle Foyer, National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 (020 7452 3400; nationaltheatre.org.uk), for three months from June 23. Admission free.

Essentials

A few years ago, Charlie Waite ran a series of online masterclasses in digital photography. Watch his expert tips and videos, and make sure you get the best possible shots this summer.

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