Coasts and Sea: Worlds Apart
The sea is alluring. It holds a deep fascination for so many people – particularly those of us who live here in Britain.
My home is in Oxford, which is nearly as far from the coast as you can be in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, it is still just an hour and a half’s drive from the south coast. And this always reminds me that Britain is indeed an island nation surrounded by water. Defined by our island geography and history we are a maritime nation. It is therefore not surprising that we Brits seem to feel such deep and intrinsic connections with the sea whenever and however we encounter it.
Whitesands Beach, Pembrokeshire - Wales 2020
Many of my happiest memories and experiences are rooted in adventures involving the sea and its coastal fringe. My earliest recollections involve playing on the beaches of Pembrokeshire and encounters with impossibly old-seeming lifeboatmen who worked taking visitors across Ramsay Sound to see the rocks and wildlife that teems along its island shores and who told stories of wrecks and lives saved against the odds.
Ramsay Sound, Pembrokeshire - Wales 2020
My father had spent two years in the Royal Navy shortly after the end of World War II, and even as a slightly dour engineer, his stories of life on a destroyer crossing the Atlantic and circling the Mediterranean instilled a sense of maritime adventure of which I have never tired.
While we were children growing up in Worcestershire – another county not famous for its associations with the sea – my parents bought a Mirror dinghy which they drove to Llangorse, a lake in the shadow of the Brecon Beacons, to sail on many weekends. It felt as though we were acting out our own Swallows and Amazons adventures, and I also recall the feeling of reluctance, as we packed the sail and ropes away each Sunday and turned the car for home.
‘Les Voiles’ Regatta, Saint Maxime - France 2019
When I was 18, a friend from school invited me to stay with his parents in the south of France. His father owned a rather larger boat which the family sailed along the fabled Riviera and down to the then little-visited islands of Corsica and Sardinia. This was the start of a life-long love of big-boat sailing that has taken me around Britain and Ireland, across the North Sea, into remote corners of the Baltic and down to North Africa and the Canary Islands.
I have been fortunate to have been able to spend hundreds of days at sea and to have covered many thousands of miles under sail. And these experiences have only served to reinforce my deep love for our oceans, while also developing a deep respect for their changing moods and capacity for danger as well as fun.
Bound for St Kilda: 2021
It is unsurprising that water and the sea form such an important element of my photographic work. A friend once asked me a tantalising question: if I could only choose one place to be to make photographs for the rest of my life, where would that be? I was not allowed to hedge my answer so, after considerable thought, I determined it would be Achnahaird – a beach and promontory along the remote coast of Wester Ross in north-west Scotland.
Achnahaird, Wester Ross, North-West Scotland 2022
For me, this location has so much to offer: dramatic landscapes against the backdrop of the hills of Assynt, intimate rock formations, wind-blown dunes, pounding waves driven by the prevailing westerlies, and the unceasing turn of the tide. The common denominator is the sea, sometimes full of light but often projecting a sense of isolation, and even menace, in its breaking waves and relentless roar.
It also illustrates another aspect of being on the coast. I believe that most of us feel a sense fascination with the ceaseless movement of the sea as it meets the apparently unchanging solidity of the land. It is a moment of transformation as the sea finally gives up its energy - perhaps dramatically on a rocky shore or with a gentler sigh on a sandy beach. Even if we do not consciously acknowledge this moment of drama, I think most people recognise the remarkable interactions of land and sea, whether it is a wave collapsing on the sand after a thousand mile journey across an ocean, or just the gentle lapping of ripples in the receding tide.
*****
Both the sea itself and coastal littorals provide opportunities to make a remarkable range of images that can convey the feelings and emotions of the photographer in that place and time. While at its simplest, a photograph is simply a two-dimensional representation of a moment in time confined within the four sides of a frame, in my work I am constantly striving to convey all the other senses that one may encounter on the deck of a boat, or standing hunched over a tripod on a wind-blown beach or balanced precariously on a rocky headland. It is all about being there.
The sea also brings its own light. You always know when you are getting close to a coast because the light changes, becoming more luminous and more saturated with colour. This is not mere whimsy but a real effect caused by the fact that the air along the coast is almost always more saturated with moisture due to the pounding of the sea and the evaporation of water. Sometimes the air feels as though it has been washed clean by a night of storms. Or sometimes it is the effect of the differential rise in temperatures between the land and the sea which often bring so-called ‘sea breezes’ as air is sucked landward by the rising air, and one starts to appreciate the unique climatic conditions which make the coastal fringe different from inland – and different from further out to sea.
Split Rock, Clachtoll, Sutherland - Scotland 2022
It is these contrasts, combined with the unique combination of sounds and smells, and even touch, that always attract me to making images at the coast or out at sea. And it is this emotional essence that I always seek to project in my work. Whether it is the loneliness of a far horizon, with no land or other boats in sight, or the raw power of a pounding surf-line, I find excitement or a sense of peaceful solitude that is different from my experience of the usual rhythms of life and the everyday.
At a more practical level, I think I am also attracted to making images of the sea and coast because they are in a state of constant flux. However frequently you travel to the same stretch of coast, the light will always be different. The tide constantly churns and smooths a beach. A piece of driftwood or seaweed, that one moment offers a perfect leading line, is tumbled with the next surge of tide and is gone. It is an ever-changing landscape that emphasises the weather and the light while being less dependent on the slow change of the seasons.
Canna, Small Isles - Scotland 2021
A shoreline offers wonderful opportunities to experiment with all kinds of photographic techniques. I enjoy playing with long exposures to create surreal images that we cannot see with our own eyes and which emphasise the essence of the sea interacting with the land. Along with long exposures’ capacity to ‘flatten’ a rippling sea into a smear of light, I have also tried to use the technique to pan the path of incoming waves to emphasise their changing shape and power against the blurring, transient backdrop of the land.
Surging Surfline, Lofoten Islands - Norway 2023
A beach is a place where you can respond to how you are feeling on the day. It may be the opportunity to tackle the grand, sweeping vista; and the challenge of placing the viewer in the moment. It may be a day of lowering cloud, drizzling rain and poor visibility that is often perfect for enhancing colours and capturing the shadowless details of a shell or cast of boulders. It may be a day simply to enjoy the light playing on the water. Or it may be a day to enjoy the excitement of a thousand seabirds soaring on thermals or clattering, noisily into clifftop nests of young. The seaborne or coastal photographer can enjoy all of this and much, much more.
The Outer Stacks and Gannets, St Kilda - Scotland 2021
As I have written about previously, last winter I travelled to northern Norway to explore the remote peninsula of the Lofoten Islands. The temperature was relentlessly stuck below freezing creating a dramatic environment of ice-filled rockpools and snow-covered beaches. The light was fleeting and my Norwegian friends were apologetic that I was not being rewarded with ‘golden hour’ sunlit rocks or the drama of the aurora borealis in the northern night sky. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was simply enjoying being there. I was enjoying the adventure and it felt exciting – definitely an environment to be treated with respect.
I now look at the images I made that week and I can feel again the cold that numbed my hands, the icy water that filled my boots on at least two occasions, and the frequent whiteouts of snow that revealed and then hid the coastal mountains. It was exciting and fun. It felt slightly dangerous and certainly adventurous.
Lofoten Islands - Norway, 2023
Lofoten may have been photographed many thousands of times, and by photographers many times more capable than me, but the images I made that week are unique to me. They represent my response – not so much to place as to the elements I found there.
This is what makes the sea and the coast such marvellous places for any photographer – and why I believe we will always be getting our phones and cameras out when we are by the sea. Being there is what it is all about.
Southern Ocean Rainbow: Antartica North 2022
