Dylan Garcia's debut photobook, Brythonic, explores Celtic mythology and looks at how these ancient stories foretell modern civilisation's relationship with the natural world and climate change. Gordon Cairns reports.

How can deliberately destroying a photograph contained within a book of art ever make any kind of sense? Well, Dylan Garcia's beautiful Brythonic, which examines the damage caused by rising sea levels both in pre-history and today, includes a print that will dissolve slowly if immersed in water. Watching the black & white image of a regal head break down into a soggy pulp begins to have its own internal logic.

Over a Zoom call, the photographer explains the concept behind the destruction. 'The idea is about transience; rising sea levels, floods and civilisations disappearing underwater like the photograph will disappear in water, he says. 'It also relates to man's actions in destroying it'

The image is of the Lost King, a statue of a noble head wreathed in laurels discovered in the Isles of Scilly, a significant location, as this archipelago off the coast of Cornwall was originally a single island before being dissected by the sea. The level of the water and the erosion of civilisation gradually increases throughout the book until the print is encountered. 'The paper dissolves into bits and disappears into the water. It is one of those elements that fits entirely into the ideas of the book!

I can't help feeling the reckless few who soak the print just to see what happens will experience the regret of those who peeled the banana from the cover of the first Velvet Underground album; something unpeeled can never be re-peeled. And unlike a major-label record, there are only 100 copies of Brythonic in existence. However, Garcia likes the idea of individual copies of the book becoming unique. 'The book is a permanent thing - you can't change the order of the images - but with the dissolving photo, it becomes slightly less permanent. Some people will destroy the photo, some will not, so they will have a different version.'

Garcia tells me there could have been more than just one image affected by liquid. We tried putting water on the book but there was no way of doing that without making a mess. I also tried putting paint on it, which can be fantastic, but a lot of the time it doesn't work. Creating a consistent body of work is quite tricky?

And yet, Brythonic already has a sense of the unique - hand-stitched in blue thread, with some pages that unfold into triptychs facing washes of blue colour, the book looks back to Celtic mythology and how these stories link with the ancients' view of the world and forwards to the long-term relationship between humans and nature.

Brythonic, a term used to describe the language and people of southern Celtic tribes settling in Cornwall, Wales and Brittany, also explores the idea of geomythology. 'A lot of legends are based on historical events. Ice ages, volcanoes and tidal waves can make their way into stories of Atlantis or floods in the Bible. I love the idea of things I thought mythological being actually true - I find that fascinating?

Garcia explains the repeated images, fold-out pages and fragmentary images are designed to mimic how we see, and how we see in the natural environment. When you go out into nature, human vision sees a lot of little things, but your mind puts it into a bigger picture. This is how optical illusions work - you see things, then your mind stores them and when you go back, your memory fills in what you saw the last time, so you are not always seeing exactly how it is.'

AIthough fragmentary, the book has a sense of unity - for instance, the natural light is similar. I wonder if the photographs were taken from the one location l at the same time of day, but Garcia explains the digital images, taken in Wales and England, were processed through the same program to create that sense of uniformity. I was working with fragments partly because nature is very fragmented and also because I am interested in textures, abstracts and little details. And also to give the project a kind of coherent look.

I was trying to create something more like an illustration, where you can leave things out, and less like a film. I was trying to narrow depth of field. For most of the images, everything I wanted in focus was in focus, although with some of the trees, it was harder than it looks. Sometimes, the simplest photo is actually the hardest, as there is always some distracting element you don't see when you take the photo. I was also trying to create something that was beautiful in some way.'

Brythonic is divided into three elements: nature, ancient civilisation and the future, represented by images of the wide, luscious fronds of tropical plants growing in the UK today. Garcia wanted to subtly show how global warming has changed the flora of the country while also reflecting back to the tropical period when the UK was populated by animals now associated with the African savannah.

The book looks at the legends of drowned lands, focusing on the sunken worlds of Lyonesse and the Lowland Hundred and Ys, all mythical lands settled by the Celts who were then punished for their sins. Lyonesse, off the coast of Cornwall, was suddenly submerged by an angry god one evening, while the Lowland Hundred in Cardigan Bay was flooded because the people turned from their duties towards lust. The myth of Ys in Brittany, a piece of reclaimed land protected by a dyke, blames a princess for leaving the dyke door open for her illicit lover to enter, thus causing the city to be inundated. These legends act as a warning for our current age of man-made global warming.

A recurring motif within the book is the silver birch. These fast-growing, hardy trees are a favourite species of the photographer, as they represent regeneration and the indestructibility of nature. They are a pioneer species. When the ice age left Scotland, silver birches were the first thing growing and they are first to return after a natural disaster. We can't destroy the world. Historically, there have been a lot of disasters, but humans are always likely to reappear, so in the book there is the idea of the resurgent power of nature.'

In a way, Garcia's photographic career has gone full circle. He started out photographing environmental campaigns and events in the 1980s. In 1992 he covered the Twyford Down motorway protest, and four years later he photographed the Newbury Bypass protest when 8,000 campaigners attempted to stop the felling of 10,000 trees to make way for the A4 bypass by chaining themselves to the trees. He also covered the first Earth Summit in Rio and other issues across the world in places such as Russia, Brazil and Finland.

Yet despite working in a field he obviously feels passionately about, Garcia began to feel cynical about this type of work. It got to a point where I would go to something and there would be a competition where lots of people would be covering that same event. It was not like I was doing anything that somebody else wouldn't be doing anyway?

He also realised he was looking for the next 'bad' thing to cover. When you are doing that kind of work, you are always looking for worse things happening. If you go somewhere and nothing bad is happening, you don't have an image.

And so he switched to becoming a travel photographer, a shift he found more relaxing. In what he describes as his 'mainstream work', his images now appear in most of the national newspapers at least monthly and are then syndicated beyond those first runs. And it is this wider distribution of his images that led him to limiting the print run of Brythonic to only 100 copies. The more widespread the use of his images, the less control he has over them.

I like the idea of a non-mass-produced thing. A lot of my work is published by the Guardian, then they syndicate it and then it is on Yahoo and MSN and all kinds of places. I like the idea of a book as a limited object in itself.'

A few copies of the book, which was published at the end of last year, have already been added to collections such as the PhMuseum in Bologna and the V&A in London.

At the start of his book, Garcia quotes a poem by Penelope Shuttle, By the hoar rock in the drowned wood, which includes the line: 'but no one knows a way back through time to when Lyonesse was fresh from the hands of its makers.'

It seems to me these lines are the key to Brythonic. No one knows, but through this body of work, the photographer is searching for that way back.

Gordon Cairns July 2025 B+W Photography Magazine