SEASIDE: PHOTOGRAPHED
2019-07-22Including early photographic depictions of waves, picture postcards revelling in the glee and grime of British resorts, intimate shots of holiday and relaxation, reportage and the photo series of eminent photographers, the exhibition presents the seaside in a multitude of different visions, celebrating our special relationship with our coast.
Since photography’s early beginnings the phenomenon of the seaside as public parade has provided myriad photo opportunities, charting a tide of enormous social change. Vicissitudes of fortune have seen utopian visions give way to the glorious failure of the English seaside, playgrounds by the sea becoming places of last resort, rackety with decay and ripe for misdemeanour, or as so much photographic evidence would insist. The exhibition’s curators Val Williams and Karen Shepherdson point out: “Photographers’ visions are necessarily partial ones – they follow their noses, sniff out the strange and the unusual, the comic and the melancholy. They do not necessarily picture things the way that they are.”
Opposite – Grace Lau, 21st Century Types, 2005
Exhibition runs through to September 8th, 2019
Turner Contemporary
Rendezvous
Margate
Kent CT9 1HG
