by Alice

Summer in the UK is tricky. We all have a funny relationship with it: the new season of Love Island; the occasional heatwaves which destroy our lives for a few weeks at a time; the ubiquitous ‘picky bits’ teas; not to mention the godforsaken midgies. Summer is tricky. However, as a person who grew up on the coast, there is one saving grace to the entire affair: the beach day. Windy, sandy, and often involving heavy day drinking, the beach day is one of the redeeming features of a British Summer. The rest of the island seems to agree with me, as the beach day is an historic and well-documented pastime of the British people, spanning the Victorian period until now. 

As part of our annual Summer Open Call exhibition, I wanted to explore our cultural relationship to the beach day, how it has been represented in art, and what it can tell us about social and art history.

The history of photography as it relates to the medium’s seaside usage is relatively short. Up until the 1840s, photography was a highly scientific and lengthy process, which made it largely inaccessible for regular people. It also made it incompatible with portraiture, since it’s pretty hard for a person to sit completely still for 20 minutes at a time. Luckily, all this changed with the invention of the wet collodion process, which was 20x faster than most previous photographic processes, making it appropriate for portraiture. Yay! However, photography was received poorly by the artistic elite, with many artists claiming that it was not a valid artistic medium. The first time he saw the daguerreotype photographic process performed, artist Paul Delaroche proclaimed ‘from today, painting is dead’. Bit dramatic, but it exemplifies contemporary attitudes towards photography. 

At around the same time, British seaside resorts, which had up until the 1850s been the equivalent of a wellness retreat for the wealthy upper classes, became accessible to the middle and working class. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, not only did the working class get access to rail travel, but they also had the slightly increased leisure time that came with the switch from agrarian to industrial work. As the working people flocked to the coast, commercial photographers followed, and in the spirit of capitalism set up hundreds of private photography studios. 

The pictures produced were often fun and playful, with many photographers providing special props and sets to maximise the fun factor. At this time, the photograph was not considered artistic and the photographers were not aiming to produce high art, but many of the images do have a painterly quality to them. In the photographs of Vanessa Bell, painter and sister to THE Virginia Woolf, the artist captures a beautiful sense of intimacy and movement, likely due to her background in painting. They also offer a great sense of movement and vitality, often showing Woolf and other subjects in motion, running away from the camera or moving up and down the beach. 

From the perspective of art history, these images tell us a lot about the social, cultural, and even sartorial conventions of the time. But at their most basic, these images can also tell a story about class. Despite the snobbery of the artistic elite, photography and other non-traditional mediums provided space for the working class within art culture. This made the medium deeply democratising, and its popularity was a testament to a widening art scene at this time. 

Moving into the 20th century, nothing could stop the incredible heights that these photographers had got to, right? WRONG! Like most fun things in the early 20th century, it was completely decimated by the First World War. But after that, they all managed to get back on their feet right? WRONG AGAIN. The Second World War finished off the entire industry, as it transpires that global war is bad for business! Following both world wars, almost all photographers struggled to re-establish themselves, and into the late 20th century, things only got worse. The democratising thing worked a little bit too well, with most private photographers going bust due to private camera ownership.

However, over time, many artist-photographers began reclaiming the genre, often subverting its historic roots to provide social and political commentary. Martin Parr, an English photographer working in Wallasey, near Liverpool, does exactly this in his 1983-1985 series, The Last Resort. The series, taken during Thatcher’s government, depicts the working-class people of Merseyside enjoying leisure time on a beach.

Parr has often commented that the series is not active socio-political commentary, saying instead that he wanted purely to depict the life and leisure of the working class truthfully, however with many of the images intentionally focusing on the degradation of the area and the disorderliness of the subjects, it is hard to think of it as anything else. The images are highly saturated with a distinctly 80s feel, but still emphasise the clear debasement and decay of the seaside. 

The images in the series play with the idea of duality, with some pictures being highly energetically charged and others in quiet stillness. There are even examples of this duality appearing in a single image; one picture depicts an older couple eating chips, sitting next to a baby who is surrounded by litter and plastic shopping bags. The three of them are visually split down the middle with a large pillar in between them. This visual separation illustrates the social and generational divide that defines these two groups. The older couple, representing an older generation appear to be content, enjoying their leisure. In contrast, the baby, representing the younger generation, is surrounded by symbols of waste, overconsumption, and rampant capitalistic greed. In essence, the photograph has actualised the downfall of the working class, whether the photographer intended it to or not.

A further series I want to explore is not British and therefore does visually and culturally differ from what I’ve been exploring so far, however, the thematic elements are similar, with a key emphasis on the impact of poverty on the working class. In Txema Salvans’ series Perfect Day (2005-2020), the artist travelled across the tourist coastline of Spain, taking pictures of people enjoying their leisure time. Many of the pictures are snapped in beaches-turned-industrial areas, with sand or boats being present in many images, but it’s the symbols of capitalism, such as large building sites, that take centre stage.

The key difference between this series and Parr’s is the role the human subjects play in it: where Parr’s figures are the cornerstone of the series, Salvans’ subjects intentionally blend into the greige industrial desert that surrounds them, with only their colourful swimming costumes to brighten the pictures. By making the figures indistinguishable from their industrial backgrounds, Salvans makes a cultural critique: not only are the lines blurred between work and leisure in late-capitalist society, but the people have become inextricably linked with capitalism, becoming visual foils of the industry which dominates the landscape.

One image that exemplifies this shows a couple eating a picnic out of a car – if it wasn’t for the large black car, the figures would blend in entirely with the concrete that surrounds them. The people, enjoying their leisure, are no longer the focal point of beach photography, but are rather a tool to illustrate the downfall of leisure as we know it.

So yes, summer is tricky. Not only because of midgies and the unavoidable Love Island discourse on Twitter, but because it brings into focus our relationship to leisure and how it’s changed. Increased leisure time for the working class was at one point a beneficial byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. But what was once a happy accident quickly became another avenue through which capitalists could exercise their power, with the window for fun for the everyman becoming smaller and smaller all the time. The only constant is our urge to document these changes. It’s another happy accident, then, that in recording the effects of capitalism on leisure, artists like Parr and Salvans contribute to the time-honoured working-class tradition of beach photography.