Returning to collecting photographs for this project, I decided to travel down to Brighton on the south coast, a place close to me and one that I have frequented often in my 25 years. The tone and moods at play here are variable, on the one hand, you have a very free, open, and expressive place with vibrancy, life, and the buzz & hum of different subcultures. On the other hand, you have a deeply historic location, rooted in Victorian ideals and regency, and an undercurrent of troubled existences with homelessness, substance abuse, and identities being forged and built as people find their way into the world perhaps having not been somewhere as enabling prior and the division that can bring as the old self and the new reshuffle the order of power within.
When I decided to go to Brighton, I didn’t have a particular expectation on what I would want to photograph, or what feelings or experiences I could or would identify (with), I had a great familiarity with the location and in other instances this has served me really well as a photographer, feeling somewhat rooted in the location I’m shooting allows me to tap into the feel both in the present but also the prior, to use my cumulative lived experience of time spent in a location to guide me in the now, to see things not just as they are in the present but the many faces they have presented to me throughout our shared encounters over time. But with Brighton, its constant sense of momentum often invites you to think more in the present looking forwards, not backward. With this in mind I decided to just capture things that caught my eye in the now whilst in the Laines, alleys, and walkways of the old town, these turned out to be some of the street art that adorns many of the surfaces in Brighton, the layers of artwork and posters forming a very interesting textured surface. Other things included the glimpses down the back alleys or thoroughfares that branch from the streets and some of the infrastructure that rises above the busy streets below.
Once I had navigated through the labyrinth of the old town and reached the seafront, the tone and mood changed to one of isolation, but not that of the previous encounters, this is a much more welcome sensation, akin more to the joyful solitude of an introvert, a contentment with the self and enjoyment of the space without the worry of social expectations. Here I wanted to capture that whilst retaining some of the tension that perpetually exists within my own anxiety, the bold atmospheres of the skyscapes at play on the coast helped to provide that, and the windfarms on the horizon also helped to amplify the isolationist tone, putting a figure or figures far away from the perspective of the photographer as a metaphor for the sometimes intentional, or sometimes inadvertent, distancing that many ND individuals practice giving breathing room from an unwelcoming and often overwhelming society.
(Cropped previews, click for full frame)
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