ENGLAND-ON-SEA

I was brought up in the late sixties in the village of Fawley and spent my childhood on the south coast of England, sinking into oily mud, picking my way across sharp shingle, and rock pooling and crabbing. It was with these childhood memories that I returned to the seaside to discover how it is changing economically, socially, and culturally. 

England-on-Sea is drawn from a nationwide tour of the English coast – a series of road trips living in the back of my Ford van where I explored the coastal landscape, and how we interact with it and to each other.

It highlights English peculiarities and eccentricities as well as more mundane scenes of everyday seaside life. I document the feelings of belonging and permanence that the coast evokes, as well as its mutability and constantly evolving cultural diversity. 

As I carried out initial test shoots, a compositional strategy emerged. I sought to document the collective more than the individual, contrasting human stories with the vastness of the coastal landscape. Stories and rituals play out across canvases rich in detail, freeing the viewer to wander over the image, rather than directing their attention to a single focal point.

My process was to decide the composition, set up the camera with a fixed viewpoint, and settle in to wait for people to populate the scene. In order to achieve sufficient depth, I needed to shoot from height, with a tripod mounted on the van and a specially adapted step ladder. This often involved making several exposures and compositing them afterwards. Each photograph could take up to two hours to complete. 

The seaside has long attracted documentary photographers and artists, both on these shores and abroad. Many of these have provided inspiration for this project, above all Joachim Brohm, Stephen Shore, Simon Roberts, Tony Ray Jones, Pieter Bruegel, and J S Lowry.

From them, I took permission to experiment. After a pandemic that broke many of the constraints that bind our societies, this was an opportunity to record our re-emerging population. We live in a country obsessed with owning land, but the coast offers an unexpected strip of common space, open to all and free from the exclusivity that characterises much of England. 

Against the backdrop of Brexit, COVID, war in Ukraine, the climate emergency, and economic recession, England-on-Sea is my journal as an itinerant, visiting the edges of our island to uncover what may be the most authentic and liberated expression of our nation.