Cromer Series
A photographic essay produced during "Stories of the Sea"collaboration at 'Cromer Artspace on the Prom' on early November 2022
Cromer Photographic Essay - browse HERE
The ‘Cromer’ series was developed only this autumn as the first of a two part photographic essay on gazing out to sea and north. The second chapter is planned at the same location and to be looking out further still and during tempestuous winter storms as well as capturing the here rarely visible Aurora Borealis. Cromer is located on the East coast of England with the unique geographical position of offering a visual ‘passage’ north without ‘landfall’, all the way to the North Pole. Gazing out to the sea, the water conceals countless shipwrecks, located and listed in specialist sea maps and inclusive of the stories of their sinking where recorded and archived. A still active crab fishing industry is in conflict with environmental aims to protect delicate reef eco systems just off shore, while comparatively shallow waters hide treacherous sand banks. Further north, and slightly east, an ambitious gaze may touch on ‘Doggerland’, the once fertile and roamed tundra until some 8000 years ago. Its submersing following melting ice caps is now both symbolic, and indicative, of climate change impact as well as an earlier ‘idea’ of Europe. More recently the area would be exploited for gas and oil extraction while shallower grounds have always been well-known as lucrative fishing grounds. Today, wind turbines are being built here with increased urgency and utilising the cheaper option of their installation on firm, if submerged, ground. Most wrecks accounted for narrate the dark story of the two world wars, the loss of ships and lives in one of the then most contested seas on this part of the globe. Traces of past events are visible through archive study, archaeology and oral history research, yet the photographs speak of absence, atmosphere and rhythms only, almost. The calm seas propose what has been, the layered and dispersed unique catastrophes, the storms instead will hint at what is to come, the self exposed and threatened. The series, captured in one week this November, is tentative like a pencil drawing, a mediation, auxiliary to my PhD studies with the title: ‘Vestiges of affect: A photographic re-calling of a forced migrant community’s landscapes, real and imagined’. These studies are part of a wider investigation into the communication of affect in landscape photography, in this case following a traumatic and sudden uprooting during conflict close to the end of the 2nd WW in Masuria, Poland, then East Prussia. As the ‘terrain’ of my photographic work is altogether located eastward in Poland and Romania, my research focus is directed this way too.
So far more than 40000 migrants have crossed the channel heading for the UK this year alone, although very few attempt a landing this far up the coast, the mind associates the sea with the desperate stories nearly as frequent as the tides. Other than abandoned small boats, life-jackets and personal clothing, the journeys remain traceless in the coastal areas beyond what is experienced or recalled, or kept in records. One may say, that their ‘exposure’ is too short, their identities declared too insignificant, their size too small, to register in camera, future maps or archives. The Norfolk coast and Cromer, now at the periphery, was a once thriving fishing port and seaside resort, it is now small and only partly recovering. Photographing remote coastal areas draws the camera towards the sea, which reveals little and yet almost everything there is. Cormorants, the ‘ravens of the sea’, feel at home here, migrating geese arrive from Siberia too. I photographed cormorants before at Oye Beach near Calais, a launch site for migrant boats, in my mind their inhabiting of coastal areas strings together the old idea of connected lands, possible paths, the human species being that of roaming kind.
Dec 2022
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