Beach Towns pt 5
Hello again!
I think I said on the last one that the next would come quickly. Indeed, here it is.
I’ve been really enjoying getting out and shooting at the beaches this summer. While it’s been busy out on the beaches, it’s much easier to come across interesting subjects. I had wanted to get to Bournemouth at some point this summer, but the routes there from Bristol (by rail and by road) are quite indirect. While it doesn’t seem all that far away, it actually takes quite a long time to get there. Upon learning this, I thought I should revisit some places I’ve been to before: Weston-super-Mare and Barry Island. I then also had a somewhat serendipitous opportunity to visit Porthcawl. It is these towns which you will see photos of in this post.
Weston-super-Mare is, in some ways, the perfect subject for this project. The beach is busy in the summer, there are donkeys, there is crazy golf, there are flags, there are hotels from a bygone era, etc etc. On this occasion, I also saw a window out to the beach which has given me a current working title for the project: “Everything the sea”.
Spurred on by the hot weather and by what I felt had been quite a productive day in Weston-super-Mare, I went to Barry Island the next day. It turned out to be a much longer journey to get there than I’d hoped, due to a wildfire near the train tracks. In the end, I only had an hour and a half in Barry Island, but it was interesting to be there during golden hour. Most of the more interesting stuff to photograph there is more at the big theme park than at the beach, but I still feel that they fit the general themes here.
A week or two later, I was in Wales with some friends, and we wanted to go to the beach. I successfully convinced them that we wanted to go to Porthcawl.
I’m not 100% comfortable in the class angle of this project, which I think is a relatively plain theme running through them, but anyway: Porthcawl is a properly working class resort town. Anyway, enough waffle, here are the photos
You know what time it is — here are the favourites. Quite a few this time round! My number one favourite is probably the one of the man watching the merry-go-round and carrying a handbag. Lots going on there.
I’m just back from a photo-taking weekend away in Kent. I’ve still got a few frames to shoot on a couple rolls of film, and then will return with my next post here.
Hope you’ve enjoyed looking through these!
