Shooting the Seaside
Last week I took the two biggest teenagers to stay on a friend’s houseboat in Shoreham-by-Sea. They’re in the middle of GCSEs and I wanted to combine a break with some time and space for revision - something that’s at a premium in our house over half term.
The weather as we set off was glorious. We were heading to the seaside in the middle of a heatwave and I was taking my camera. I’ve had mixed success shooting on the beach. I’ve struggled with exposure and with getting close enough to the scene I wanted to photograph; there’s something that holds me back when people are at their most relaxed, in opposition to everything I experience on the busy streets of the city. I wanted to push through that on this trip.
Of course some of my favourite photography is of British seaside towns. Martin Parr, Tony Ray-Jones, David Hurn and Simon Roberts have led the way and are no means an exhaustive list. Photographs from towns like Southend-on-Sea, Shoeburyness, Leigh-on-Sea, Frinton-on-Sea, Clacton-on-Sea and Walton-on-the-Naze, are evocative of my own childhood experience and bring a laconic lense to bear on scenes of archetypal ‘Britishness’ by the seaside.
Shoreham and Worthing are also my happy places. I’ve escaped to my ‘friend by the sea’ during some of my toughest times and always return home lighter. Some of my favourite pictures are from those times. This time the teenagers had cameras too - a donated Campsnap and a disposable Kodak - and watching them capture each other and their surroundings with none of the fear that we adults talk about when shooting in public, was one of my favourite parts of the trip.
And so after they’d revised, we went to the beach with friends, swam, paddle boarded, ate ice cream, and we took pictures, before heading back to our boat home and eating fish and chips on the harbour wall whilst fending off seagulls and watching other teenagers enjoying all the freedoms of their seaside town.
Martin Parr et al didn’t capture perfect people in postcard ready towns, but they did capture the British seaside perfectly, and for three days it felt like we were in one of those scenes, loving every moment.
words and pictures by Katie Lashmar