I’m proud to be a journalist, however not at all times happy with my occupation. For instance, dwelling in a British coastal city, I’ve seen how newspaper reviews have a behavior of swinging between two equally lazy narratives. The narrative is both about decline—boarded-up arcades, fading Victorian grandeur, a city “left behind”—or it flips into regeneration: all artisan espresso and rocketing home costs.
Each tales normally have their info proper, technically not less than. However the total image typically feels hopelessly alien to locals, myself included, largely as a result of it has been written from the surface, by somebody “trying in” for a fortnight at most.
Polly Braden’s new pictures exhibition In opposition to the Tide, now open at Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol, does one thing totally different. Her goal was to really get below the pores and skin of British seaside cities by handing some inventive management to the residents themselves.
Correct analysis
It is all the results of greater than a 12 months of in-depth analysis. Polly and Guardian journalist Lisa Bachelor visited a variety of conventional seaside cities, speaking to 16- to 25-year-olds about what their lives are literally like.
Ceilidh, 21, in Weston-Tremendous-Mare. In opposition to the Tide, 2026. {Photograph} by Polly Braden
Millicent, a 22-year-old high quality artwork graduate from Jaywick. In opposition to the Tide, 2026. {Photograph} by Polly Braden
Joe, 22 years outdated, Blackpool. In opposition to the Tide, 2026. {Photograph} by Polly Braden
That is neither the model that leads to a shiny council regeneration brochure, nor the one in a doom-laden newspaper characteristic in regards to the “left behind”. As a substitute, we glimpse one thing nearer to the muddled fact.
Polly and Lisa did not really feel the necessity to invent a “hook”. They discovered one just by asking good questions and sticking round lengthy sufficient for sincere solutions.
Unstated rigidity
The press picture main the exhibition is a present to any image editor: a man in an Easter Bunny costume trying forlorn, on a misty seashore in entrance of an ageing fairground journey. It is humorous. It additionally factors to an uncomfortable fact about seaside Britain: that the infrastructure of old school enjoyable remains to be standing, even the place the old school enjoyable itself could have packed up and left.
That unstated rigidity runs via the entire present. Alongside large-format portraits of kids, shot with the form of clear-eyed dignity Polly has constructed her profession on, there are photographs of dressing-room mirrors, empty automobile parks, fairground wheels in opposition to bruised skies, piers evoking grandeur via the fog.
Charlie, 17, and Keane, 19, each from Eastfield, and Jack, 17, from Scarborough, pictured at Oliver’s Mount, overlooking Scarborough. Keane wrote a play as a ‘love letter’ to his dwelling city. In opposition to the Tide, 2026. {Photograph} by Polly Braden
Trinity, 14, Layla, 16, and Maisie, 15, on the Buckland youth exercise centre, Portsmouth. In opposition to the Tide, 2026. {Photograph} by Polly Braden
Taylor. In opposition to the Tide, 2026. {Photograph} by Polly Braden
It is the visible language that any seaside resident will recognise: gaudy signage, pale glamour, climate that refuses to cooperate. Polly understands that ironic contradiction is a part of the coastal panorama, with out ever slipping into compelled exaggeration or lazy mockery.
Key takeaway for creatives
This is the lesson, I believe, that creatives usually can draw right here. Whereas documenting seaside cities sometimes descends into tiresome cliché, what rescues In opposition to the Tide from that destiny is the sense of knowledgeable collaboration that runs via it.
Polly and Lisa did not simply flip up, take some candid photographs, after which run away. As a substitute, they held workshops in Weston-super-Mare, Blackpool, Whitehaven and Brightlingsea, the place kids have been taught to take their very own images.
Weston-super-Mare. In opposition to the Tide, 2026. {Photograph} by Polly Braden
The Ferris wheel at Clacton Pier. In opposition to the Tide, 2026. {Photograph} by Polly Braden
Blackpool enjoyable palace In opposition to the Tide, 2026. {Photograph} by Polly Braden
These photographs now sit alongside Polly’s within the present, and in a companion exhibition, Moreover the Sea, in Arnolfini’s Gallery 5. There’s additionally a wall of handwritten postcards exchanged between contributors in numerous cities: peer-to-peer correspondence between youngsters in Tendring and Scarborough, who’d in any other case don’t have any cause to ever cross paths.
Actual voices, actual lives
“Co-creation” is commonly simply an empty advertising and marketing buzzword, however right here it is accomplished for actual. And the accompanying testimony backs this up. There’s actual ambivalence right here: not poverty tourism dressed up as artwork, nor a regeneration puff piece.
Keane from Scarborough says, “Once I go away right here, there’s at all times going to be part of me that stays behind.” Michael from Blackpool pushes again onerous in opposition to the doom narrative: “So many good issues are occurring right here, however no one is telling these tales.” Millicent, in Tendring, says all of it when she says: “On one hand, there’s not a lot right here. However my home is correct on the seafront. I simply love that.”
Polly Braden at Arnolfini (set up view) ‘In opposition to the Tide’. Courtesy of the artist and Arnolfini. Pictures by Dan Weill
None of this, importantly, reads as scripted. All of it reads because the form of nuance that takes a 12 months of precise presence to earn.
For anybody whose work includes telling different individuals’s tales for a dwelling, it is definitely worth the journey alongside the M4 or M5 to expertise this exhibition. If solely as a reminder that the most effective angle is typically the one which’s been sitting on a foggy seashore, ready for somebody to really cease and look.
