Following on from my photographic work at The Barbican, I proceeded to take a trip down to the south-east coast of Kent and visit the iconic location of Dungeness. Already well known as a location far outside of everyday society and featuring in many eminent pieces of media from film and television to music videos and artwork, the strange, stark, and isolated nature of Dungeness has been a creative draw to many over the years and I was keen to experience and photograph this landscape for myself.
The drive into the hamlet of Dungeness passes through suburbs, fantastically retro seaside resorts, Ministry of Defence land, wildlife reserves, and then, for a great distance, nothingness. The Romney Marshes that lay behind the spur of Dungeness aren’t suitable land to be built upon, even the wooden fences that line the roads that pass through it are warped and skewed from the water-logged sandy quagmire, the flatness of the region too is something that adds to the alien nature of the place much unlike many areas of England with its iconic rolling hills and corkscrew country lanes, being so close to the coast you felt as if you were driving to the end of the country and at any minute the English Channel would be upon you. You soon leave the marshes though and soon you begin to see the return of civilisation, but even then, it is in a most bizarre, juxtaposing, and unique way. It begins by seeing in the distance a great structure, towering in white and grey, two great cubes standing on the horizon shrouded in sea mist, these are in fact two nuclear power stations, Dungeness A and B, one of the most modern of all constructs, another of man’s great acts of hubris towards the natural world, making electricity by tearing apart the very atoms that make up the known universe, nuclear fission.
Despite their somewhat benign appearance (aside from their size), the buildings have such an ominous tone to them, placed as they are flat against the sky with miles of nothingness around them, not by chance but by design, contained within these great cubes are nuclear reactors containing hundreds of kilograms of some of the most dangerous and toxic materials known to human life Uranium 235, Caesium 137, Strontium 90, Iodine 131, and Plutonium 239 to name a few, all form part of the nuclear chain of decay, the life cycle of atoms of nuclear fuel as they split apart during radioactive decay to change and form different elements within the core of a nuclear reactor, some with half-lives of seconds, decaying completely within minutes, others with half-lives measured in centuries that will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Just as with any nuclear power station, the security and safe running of these plants is paramount but small background-level leaks do occur and over time these leach into the ground and in turn into the fauna and flora of the surrounding areas hence the sparse population, and Dungeness is no different, the plants grown in the areas around the power station do contain trace amounts of radioactive elements and are unsafe to consume.
It is then surprising to find the next human constructs you see when arriving at Dungeness then are fishermen’s cottages, small wooden homes dotted along the shingle bar that the hamlet sits upon, with a single black tarmac road and a telegraph line running alongside it, creating a pathway all the way around to the power stations in the distance. Upon arrival at Dungeness, parking not too far from Prospect Cottage, the former residence of the artist, film director, and gay rights activist Derrick Jarman, I was immediately struck with the vast openness of the landscape that now surrounded me for miles, there is no sign of anything bar the shadow of the power station in the distance that would tell you anything about where, or when you are. It lies in a sort of preserved state, with aged wooden cottages and the singular road in and out it feels almost like you’re at the end of the line, strolling around the boundary between the atmosphere of the living and the solitude of the dead. The second thing you notice is the silence, there is such a sense of still quietness there that any sound at all becomes highlighted, the crunch of shingle underfoot, the passing of cars tires on the tarmacked road, the calls of distant seabirds and you even begin to wonder if you can hear the low thrum of the nuclear reactors on the horizon it’s that quiet.
Taking pictures here felt very much like documenting an alien world, trying to capture the sensations of what you felt being there, the confusion surrounding the odd arrangement of ultra-modern construct beside the quaint traditional cottage, even the designation of ‘hamlet’ being evocative of some medieval realm, the sense of isolation from the rest of the world like that I felt at the barbican prior but far, far more intense and literal in this case. Again I felt I could draw a comparison to the isolation I associate with my neurodiversity, less so the mind as with the barbican but more the physical, personal level of isolation that accompanies me, perhaps that sense of standing out, like the power station in the distance, always there in the background driving away others from staying for too long, the unnatural nature of nuclear power being perhaps allegorical of the outlying nature of my Asperger’s, its differences acknowledged, its nature understood, yet still not accepted enough to keep within the realms of everyday society.
*Cropped previews, click for full image
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