Beside the sea – Postcards from the English South Coast
Why the seaside?
Well, I grew up in a little seaside town and spent a lot of time wandering around and around, even in the dead of winter. And now I find myself back in another seaside town, so it’s subject matter I know very well. It’s an interesting location, as the mood and feeling changes from the busy in-season buzz to the quiet out-of-season period. Superimposed on that annual cycle has been a gradual decline in the popularity of the English seaside holiday over the years, with the growth of cheap foreign holidays and budget airlines.
Where were the photos taken?
The pictures were taken at resorts along the English south coast, including Weymouth, Bournemouth, Swanage, Lyme Regis, Brighton, West Bay and somewhere in the English Channel. The bulk were taken over the period 2006–2008. I’m currently unsure if the project is finished or just resting as far as the shooting is concerned.
Do you often talk to yourself?
Erm, next question…
Photographs: Paul Russell
Music: Derek Pierce, aka ‘beatsystem’ – www.myspace.com/beatsystemuk
Website: www.paulrussell.info
beautiful…
and i hope the project is not finished yet…
thanks.
For once something unpretentious. No drama, no effects, just a series of good photographs. Love these.
This has a wonderful mood and kept me wanting to see more..
Thanks.
I’ve seen many of these images before as singulars but I enjoyed the concise edit, Paul. As someone who currently lives and photographs by the sea, even in *British* Columbia, I have to say that your part of the world seems very unique… and strange.
Well done.
it’s clear you’ve got a lot of affection for the places you’re photographing…for me there are shades of Martin Parr’s work in New Brighton…
i really enjoyed it. they made me smile and look forward to summer
Paul you have a VERY good eye and a nice sense of humor! Elliott Erwitt should be proud of you! Any influences? Okay – you use colour.
I enjoyed looking at the images and the different stories in them. There was always a new surprise. Pretty bizarre moments. I always suspected the Brits to be mad. Thanks for the proof ;-)
You can keep on taking this kind of photographs for the rest of your life!
Thank you so much!
Reimar
Lovely, Paul. I’ll echo Sebastian above. You had me laughing out loud in delighted surprise as some of these came up on my screen. I would hope you are just resting, because I see this as an ongoing (and on and on going) project. By the way I lived in Whitstable for a year ages ago, and these images really ring a bell.
hahahahaha
teeheheehehe
heeehhhheeheheheee
(thanks – gotta get some water)
I’m with Reimar: Elliot Erwitt came to mind, but you have your own touch, Paul, and it is a gentle touch. Yes, you see the wonderfully absurd in our species but at the same time you obviously love us anyway. Or maybe you love us BECAUSE OF our absurdities. I, like so many here, couldn’t wait to see the next pic. Please take your rest but summer will soon be upon us and I hope you’ll be out there clicking away. I want to see more!!!
Patricia
street photography at its best. will make a really nice book one day, hopefully soon
If you’re around Cardiff, you can see some of these as prints in the new park liberal club till Friday, then in xm24 in Bologna starting on the 9th of May ;-)
What a lucky coincidence for some promotion so that Maciej stops telling me that I don’t promote events.
SEBASTIAN…
for once?? hmmmm, i think you had better take a look at the last 20 essays published….in any case, i too just love to see pure “seeing”….
cheers, david
Congratulations Paul! I recognize the soft colours of England – and the eccentricity! If anyone wants to understand the English – look at photograph number three. Classic!
Please keep it up – and follow Capa – get closer. It’s not easy; at first: but the more you talk the more you can photograph. The more you photograph, the more people ignore you. Take my advice Paul (I won’t) and follow your subjects home.
Best wishes; good English light,
Mike.
great edit Paul, they all look very exact in composition and just wonderful colour harmony, never does it ever trip over into garish. Many of them also have that arrested energy (image twelve) that pure colour street has cornered the market on, as well as plenty of w.t.f. factor as well, the opening image being in the ‘priceless’ category.
i’m really chuffed with all the visual pace and variety you’ve blended in there, i appreciate that’s really a challenge when you’ve got pretty ‘samey’ compositions to work with. The other challenge of hard-light seems well conquered as well Paul, the images have some fantastic dynamic range and simple things like the white on the costumes in image four retaining all the pleasing tones is a real treat.
image fourteen is just brilliant, it’s better than that, it’s brilliant fine art; the ambiguity, and the arrangement, and the tonality, and the bird and the girl. Can I buy this print Paul?
Just to balance things a bit, i do think the framing of some of the images seems to fall into the street photography trap, that aspect where they become more of a celebration of the ironic subject verse the magic of making the frame lines a canvas and teasing out a more pleasing comp, image three makes me think this a bit, as does image ten, ironically for both those images i think the shot was lower and to the right, but i appreciate this inexact quirkiness is also the pleasing side of the results as well. Image twenty shows what i mean though, it’s almost all framing-vision here well implemented, and framed any other way it would have been less interesting.
if you get a chance Paul, i’d like to here what you think about image fourteen, i’d love to hear you’re keen to extend this project with the same subject matter, but with an edit of more images like fourteen, images with a haunting feeling of ambiguity to it, verses ironic humour.
For anyone else less exposed to Paul’s talent, please look at this image as well, i will always think of THIS image as a Paul Classic!
-Joe
p.s. on image sixteen i would have loved to see that body surfer get framed in one of the cracks of the girls, that would have been such a treat!
Brilliant series, you’ve got a great eye for those subtle, hard-to-see but oh so everyday moments. One of the nicest photo essays on here.
Almost every photograph made me smile :)
Paul. I just have to join in and agree with what’s been said. I can’t say it any better but wanted to add my appreciation. loved looking at the series. anne
Congratulations Paul.
Very enjoyable seeing your work in this format. I think your city work would be just as comfortable here. Image 17 here is my favourite (and one I hadn’t seen before), just bizarre! Can’t wait for the book.
What a wonderful series. Each images is like eyecandy and relates to the next one to tell a universal story. I also respond to the use of scale,atmosphere and a little whimsy. I would love to see more.
btw: # 14 is my favorite.
this was the most playful essay to date. congratulations, you officially made me homesick for the beach.
Oh man! This makes me very nostalgic! I grew up near to the coast in East Anglia and love to photograph in the costal towns when I go back. I can hear it… smell it… Thanks for the little trip down memory lane.
Fun playful images. A little disengaged… no interaction with your subjects, but this is obviously how you intended the project. Each image is a great little individual scene, with its characters paying out in your frame. I like that the images are all technically very similar with quite muted tones and flat light (very obviously England!!) its ties the piece together nicely.
Nice one!
there’s no doubt where htese images are from but its artistry in which you frame and compose these images that give them there fantastic nature. brilliant. more more more
Great sense of place.
Paul,
You have a great eye for catching these moments and you seem to have had a lot of fun shooting. I have been smiling throughout the essay. Very refreshing. There is a bit of Martin Parr in you with more of a sense of humour, english sense of hunour of course (Presumably, you are from England!). There are maybe 2/3 pictures that sort of appear “more serious” that you could edit out in my view but these are aesthetically your better shots so I am not even sure….
So brilliantly Bristish and, despite coming from a French man, I mean this as a genuine compliment :):):)
Cheers,
Eric
Paul
Brilliant stuff, amazing, bizarre, captures perfectly the peculiar twist that is the Brits. Can’t say enough. thankyou.
Mike R and Paul
It’s so funny, Mike…you tell Paul to get closer and one thing i REALLY like is his distance. I looked at these photos and i was awestruck by his sense of street geometry. This is sooooooo hard to do well. I try and i can count on one hand the times i got it right. I get close, very close and you know what they say about familiarity and contempt. I get a little tired of all that intimacy. i yearn to take at least 25% of my street photos from a distance and get that same geometry that Paul seems to do so easily. When i pull back and shoot all i get is a handful of random characters scattered willy nilly around the place. But Paul seems to nail it every time. Interesting the difference in our reactions, no?
Other things i like, the beautiful diffused light..so different from the hard contrasty straight overhead light that comes with the territory much further south where i am. The creamy colors, especially the color of the water which has to be the reason the word ‘seafoam’ was invented. Paul’s sense of the comic and absurd. So Brit’ all by itself. The ambiguity of some..the guy lying on the grass with the chairs behind him. It looks like he just keeled over suddenly from an upright position. It’s just completely absurd. The guy riding the back of the tractor along the edge of the beach like some ridiculous beach toy, the couple hugging look like a perfume commercial, the guy pushing the horse down the road like he just unscrewed it from its base and walked off with it. The dog and man digging in the and..well, this almost looks set up but i believe it happened just this way cuz you never could have gotten that dog to be so cooperative unless you buried a sausage in the sand, mmm..maybe that’s what they’re both digging for, haha, buried sausage. The cigarette sticking out of the woman’s mouth in #3 mirrored brilliantly by the snorkle sticking out of the kid’s mouth. I guess i know which side of the smoking controversy you sit on ;);)
Well i could go on and i will tomorrow..i can’t see straight i’m so tired..so congratulations..this is one fun, smart, acid sharp essay disguised as humorous little postcards.
best~
kat
Mike,
the get closer thing s such a cliche these days. If Paul were to get closer he would be shooting something completely different. Its just as tough to shoot good upclose shots as it it is to shoot good removed shots. Paul does his thing really well.
Rafal
i don’t know about it being a cliche to shoot up close but otherwise i completely agree with you! Paul is doing great stuff just the way he’s doing it. i love it!
best
kat~
Paul,
Let me join the chorus… delightful!
Paul and Kathleen,
Yes, hooray for distance! Closeness is great, but so is stepping back, taking it all in, seeing it and presenting it in such elegant fashion.
DAH,
Thanks for posting this one! Renews my hope that you might someday even like some of my own work.
Sidney..
hi-five-ing you!
yep!
Kathleen,
the shooting per se isnt, but the comments are. Maybe because I know Paul, I know he shoots this way because he wants to not because he is afreaid to get closer. Lots of times people will assume the latter and advise people to shoot closer. But shoting closer isnt the end all, be all of photography, and I would argue that Capa had MUCH more in mind when he made that statement, less about the actual physical distance to the subject, more about the emotional or intellectual distance….being more wrapped up in the subject matter than how many inches you are to your target. Capa was close, not because he was physically close…some of his most famous shots aren’t really that close…the one of the falling soldier isn’t really much closer than Paul gets. But Capa was close to his subject, which was war, because thats what he lived and breathed. He was commited, he didnt just pop in to Europe fir a bit and snap some shots and then on to something totally different. He died shooting war, and thats what made him CLOSE.
Rafal, that is SO well said. Like Kat, I tend to get right in people’s faces, but with a new project I’ve recently undertaken I’m doing my best to take in people’s environments as well as their faces. I feel just as close to them emotionally, in some ways more so. There’s something respectful about valuing a person’s surroundings enough to literally “place” them there in a photograph. It gives them context.
Now our frind Paul is a master at being close to his subjects while standing and shooting at a distance. Again, like Kat, I am in awe of the geometry of his placement of elements in his photos. And it’s all so obviously NOT set up or manufactured. What an incredible eye!
Patricia
Rafal
I never thought about the Capa statement just that way but i think you could be right.. You have to feel it to shoot its soul and if you don’t shot its soul, why bother? I also agree that it’s the easy assumption that if a person doesn’t shoot close it’s because they can’t. And honestly, most times it IS because they’re intimidated. But if you can shoot close and you choose, as Paul has done, to shoot at a distance you do so from a place of strength. And the ironic thing is that i believe you have to know how to get close before you draw back. i think it’s easier to arrange one big thing in a small frame than several small things in a big frame. All that space to manage, so much can go wrong. And not only manage the composition but the tiny people have to actually convey something meaningful with their expression, their posture or their movement through the frame. Not easy at all. Great discussion, Rafal..
kat~
Kat,
Im pretty much convinced that its what Capa meant. Id love to hear David weigh in on it, its one of those quotes that I believe has outgrown its context as it has become so often used. Im sure David, would have good insight as to what Capa meant, or atleast it would be interesting to see how David reads that sentence.
Patricia..
Exactly…wow, so many times i think i’m out there thinking this stuff all by myself..it’s so great to hear others like you and Sidney, Rafal and Paul coming to the same conclusion as a result of your own unique experience, projects, philosophy. You just don’t know how affirming it is for me to read this. I especially liked this:
“There’s something respectful about valuing a person’s surroundings enough to literally “place” them there in a photograph. It gives them context.”
thanks, Patricia!
kat~
Rafal
Now i’m pissed at you..i was all ready to turn off the computer and go to bed and instead i have a big Capa book on my lap, written in Spanish no less, trying to see if there’s anything about that..yes, David could certainly elaborate on this i think..what a great topic of discussion! Paul, now see what you did?!?! :)))
kat~
distance…
close..
waves..
or lack of…
beach
pleasure..
where’s the heat?
the beach..
so different than Chris B’s storm series…
love the contrast….
frame 12 is my favorite..
take away….
take me away…
to the beach…
and let me watch…
visual circus…
visual games….
from afar…..
don’t get too close….
you might get burned…
xox
**
Kathleen,
thanks,
as far as distance, I am shooting a “street” (sort of, but its totally unautobiopgraphical, and in color) project where I made the decision from the start to step back and create space. I think, back to Capa, that it would be far too restricting to simply think of the quote in terms of physical distance, you would end up with a pretty monotonous body of work at the end of the day. Variety is the spice of life, and it applies to photography, too. I like to see varied angles, distances, frames..seems to me that if I just saw up close shots, it would be boring.
Rafal
Just a glance at the text and what Capa did was to combat the dehumanizing nature of war, to put a face on it. And so that totally dovetails with your theory. You must be right..that’s what he meant about getting close. Put a face on it. Humanize it. And you are right. Many of the photos are taken from a middle distance, many aren’t sharp or precise but they are all rich and warm and heartfelt, i.e. “close”..
kat~
Back to Paul,
if we are to assume that Im right about what Capa meant then to me Paul’s essay fits those words perfectly. He isnt gettinng in people’s faces but he is obviously committed to his project, his subject matter, etc.
I love the depth of this project…meaning, the geometry and depth of each individual frame. The (apparently) arguable distance from which he shoots is what creates the depth within these photographs. (I’m winking at you, Kat. How I do love your feisty spirit and how you stand your ground). The moments caught, the color, the interesting characters (glad to know that this was shot on the English seaside as it does emulate a British feel), the edit…all superb. I feel like the story has not yet been completely told, and I’m wondering what will be revealed next…I want chapter two.
Rafal
Well, yes and no..Yes, he’s “close” relative to his commitment to his project. But i think Paul keeps an emotional distance as well. I do think he shoots as a somewhat dispassionate observer. Not coldly, not indifferently. But from a different place than Capa. And i think this is Paul’s signature. I don’t think Paul necessarily puts a face on it. He has a way of showing us the absurdity of human behavior. But we’re not laughing at the subject. The photos are not taken at their expense. And the distance is a respectful one as much as a physical one. David gave some advice to Bodo recently, to not just let us “see” the subject but let us “meet” them. I thought that was wonderful BUT, but..sometimes i want to observe subjects at a distance, from exactly the distance that Paul shoots from. I don’t want to meet, i want to see. i want the photo to tell me some kind of essential truth without the unique nature of the individual taking over the whole photo.
i don’t know, i am utterly wiped so am probably contradicting myself like crazy..best to sign off..
toodles!
kat
Nice one.
How can your project come to and end, this subject is continuous, the English by the seaside, truely eccentric.
You obviously walk around with your eyes wide open, great. You have a real ability to see the world as a stage before you.
That all too familiar overcast sky at the british seaside.
Great moments.
Ian
Carrie
*winkbackatcha*
chapter two, and three, and four and five and….and…and…
hugs
kat~
Big smile this morning, thank you so much…
all the best, audrey
This is good Paul, congratulations. I saw many of your images here and there already but as a coherent series it gains strength and becomes better than the single shots. Good stuff!
Cheers, Erik
This is good Paul, congratulations. I saw many of your images here and there already but as a coherent series it gains strength and becomes better than the single shots. Good stuff!
Cheers, Erik
I didn’t have time to go through the comments but I’m sure that others might have noticed the apparent influence, subject similarity and wit of approach, with Tony-Ray Jones photographs who back at the sixties, begining seventies, have long and discernmently, photographed the English at the seaside.
My absolute favorite of the set, is number 6. My main objection to the set, is a lack of consistency to the approach, specifically in regard to framing, distance from the subject etc and imo the editing should have been a tad tighter.
All in all, enjoyful!