Winter journey

"His wild years behind him at last, Alfred Ashby has returned to where he was raised, the family farm in rural southwest England. Once a sought-after fashion photographer, he long ago renounced artifice and glamour to document the beauty and the horror of some of the world's least glamorous places. Now in his late fifties, he sorts his prints and negatives and takes inventory of a varied and unsettled life. The old house in the valley - his one fixed point, the place where he belongs - affords him necessary solitude and a link to a more tranquil past.". "His solitude is broken by a January…