Photos from the seaside
“The sea, the snotgreen sea,
the scrotumtightening sea.”
James Joyce; Ulysses
The snow is a metre deep and such a drag to walk through
that little things like a litre of milk from the shop 50 metres away need decisions
and planning. It has been cold for so long that when the temperature rises to minus
5 we believe that things are looking up. After all, a month ago it was reported
that the Prairies were colder than Mars. Down in North Carolina a state of
emergency has been called because an inch of snow has fallen, which might
suggest that they aren’t that educated down there. Even in Istanbul, world
capital of traffic accidents, (or maybe that’s Mumbai) they still know how to
drive through a couple of inches of snow without wiping out every nearby vehicle. Then again, snow
falls so seldom in North Carolina that we can forgive them what looks like
unnecessary anxiety.
Inevitably thoughts turn to the beach, that stretch of long
white sand that people in Western Australia take for granted, or did until
their government told them there were schools of man-eating sharks waiting off
shore for the first fool to dip his toe in the water. Thousands don’t believe
the Government but it isn’t entirely making things up. Marine biologists agree
that sharks are more of a problem than they used to be, though the Government
conveniently dodges the issue that its own bad management of the environment
has led to conditions where sharks’ natural diets are disappearing. It’s not
that sharks dislike us; they have nowhere else to go for food but the
shoreline. But not to worry: if anything will keep those predators at bay it
will be the toxic sludge leached into the water.
The beach: it used to be the place to go to rid oneself of
worries.
There are plenty of photographic books about the beach, from
historical accounts of seaside resorts full of postcard reproductions made to
look as dull as their subject is interesting, to others that are basically porn
spelled A R T. Yes, to some of us the beach means Edwardian ladies walking
along the promenade in enough clothing to repel a tank; to others their
descendants wearing nothing but a few grains of sand. What seems to be missing
from all this is a book about “The Beach”, or as the English prefer to call it,
“the Seaside”: a place but also an idea.
For some reason the history of the seaside begins with the
English. To be absolutely historically accurate, it should start with the
French and the Riviera, the Cote d’Azur, since they were the first to turn the
seaside into a tourist venue, yet that detail usually gets lost. Possibly
because the French resorts were for the upper classes whereas in England they
started out for everyone. Responsible factory owners might pay for the workers
to have a bank holiday by the sea, once they realized that one day’s largesse
could buy them a few months of respect. Also, if you were living in places like
Leeds and Nottingham, where the air alone was toxic enough to raise infant
mortality rates to one in four, the seaside with its fresh breezes became a
kind of mythical sanctuary.
Is it the same idea of sanctuary that also leads the broken
hearted and the generally troubled to the beach? Some people instinctively head
there the moment things turn wrong. Filmmakers have understood this for years.
Want to show that the romance has ended? Put one of the characters on an empty
beach and let them walk alone until they become a small speck on the screen. It’s
a perversion of the idea of sanctuary, being out in the wide open and all
alone, but we know that it is here that a person is safest with their thoughts.
And it’s also a a perversion because the beach is a world where the sun shines,
mostly, and the people who inhabit it have no body fat, arteriosclerosis or stiff
joints.
Of course, it would be silly to think of the beach as only a
place where the broken hearted went to cure their inner heartaches. If that
were the case our coastlines would be crowded with victims of existential
misery. Who’d want to go near them then? Of course they are places for fun. No
doubt those early pioneers who sat in a studio in their well constructed
swimsuits thought they were having that, but as everyone knows, actual fun, the
real stuff, begins when you strip down and charge into the water. The beach is
a place where hang-ups aren’t left at the door, so to speak, but thrown on the
ground This is a great photo: all about fun but strangely gloomy, and that
construction in the background suggests they are somehow way out to sea, in the
middle of nowhere.
My research, admittedly light, indicates that during the 19th
century thousands, maybe even millions of Britishers flocked to the seaside,
but taking the waters apparently meant getting close though not getting in them. There was a reason for that.
Most people couldn’t actually swim. If they went in the water, they’d sink like
a stone and that would be the last we’d hear from them, save a headstone in the
local cemetery. ‘Taking the waters’ usually meant standing knee deep in the sea
and breathing in the air, which would have helped if you had spent the rest of
the year in a town like Leeds, sucking in the triumphs of the Industrial
Revolution.
His name is Bill and he is a G.I. Her name is Velma. It is
1944, and a story with a G.I named Bill and a girl called Velma has more or
less written itself. It won’t end well. One of them will be holding the gun at
the end. Let’s enjoy their happiness while we can.
Collect snapshots and before you know it you’ll have dozens
like this one, of people with their head above water. It is one of those scenes
we can’t resist buying partly because people couldn’t resist taken them. It is
a self-created genre. The greatest gift George Eastman gave us wasn’t the
camera but the means to photographs moments like this.
Any book devoted to the seaside has to include advertising
and swimsuit models. These days thanks to colour, cheap printing processes and
possibly a general decline in taste the images are mostly routine. In Turkey
the 1940s you could buy a bar of Golden chocolate and get an actual photo of a
Hollywood star, photographed by a leading studio photographer, a ridiculous
notion today to most people in marketing, who’d reason it was too expensive and
the public wouldn’t appreciate the gesture.
Finally we come to the seaside of the mind. While the
Edwardian English stood on the promenade breathing in the sea air, convinced they
were better off than their choleraic and typhoid riddled parents, a tribe of landlocked
Paris and Berlin photographers were wondering why they had to travel so far
when they could construct the seaside in their studios. In their imaginations,
which they would say were also the public’s, whatever that meant, the seaside
was the arena, what we might call the canvas, for an eroticism that was fey and
artificial, and vivid because of that.
The scope for such a project is vast, and we haven’t yet
considered where Asia, Africa and South America belong in it. The feeling is
that whoever took it on would soon find that one image on its own can’t account
for the enormous variety of ways the seaside is represented. There are genres
within genres and they themselves contain subtle distinctions. A thorough
history of the beach must amount to thousands of images, showing us how people
from Brooklyn thought of the seaside different to how people in Blackpool or
Beijing did; what people who lived by the sea and those who never saw it thought
of it; what the beach was like after hemlines went up, and before Jaws; why the English wore their clothes in the sand and why thousands of Australians are lining up to have growths removed. It’s
something to leave to our descendants, so that they can look out across that
putrid, acidic wasteland we'll leave to them and think that once we worshipped it.
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