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2: Rye Harbour Research

INTRODUCTION

This project was designed to get a feel for my main project idea. I aimed to generate ideas and images for further discussion with Tutor and Students, as well as collect some resources or pointers for information sources and perhaps make some contacts. I’ve also included some reflective commentary within the text in an attempt to show my thoughts at this early stage.

IDEAS

  • Panoramic images to represent flat salt marsh – Yan Preston recommended Kate Mellor’s work: https://www.katemellor.com/island-the-sea-front
  • Fading images, cyanotypes washed in the local water and faded under the elements and filmed
  • Can of course just use cyanotype as a “straight” representation of a monochromatic subject such as the shoreline with breakers, with an appropriate blue wash. A suggestion from a student group was to make the cyanotypes of objects such as plants in situ, by attaching the undeveloped paper to the plant on a sunny day (!)
  • Analogue cyanotype film – see Tycho Jones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqIAbnSQuN4
  • Another tint suggestion from a student group was infrared. I would like to work with this more although not sure Rye Harbour is the place due to lack of trees but might work with the lower-lying vegetation…?
  • Prints on sugar paper that dissolves, filmed in local water i.e. a fading landscape
  • Use Rye paper – or see if anyone makes paper locally in Rye
  • Salt prints using salt paper made from salt created by evaporating sea water, washed in local water
  • Consider area as evolving liminal space – salt marsh between land and sea
  • History of area is one of landscape loss to the sea – consider how to represent this eg using historic imagery from Google – see https://photo515050level3.wordpress.com/2022/06/27/4-mapping-change-photography-as-research/ or look to Simon Norfolk for inspiration: https://www.simonnorfolk.com/when-i-am-laid-in-earth
  • Exhibition on breakers
    • Could be cyanotypes that fade in sun (Q do they recover at night?)
    • Could accept degredation of imagery through time
    • Could waterproof images
    • Could install images below the hightide line and film them being overwhelmed by the sea
    • Need permission, from …?
  • Project images
    • Lifeboat men onto lifeboat house – note much work has already been done on this, might be too obvious a subject, would need permission and perhaps also consent of families?
    • Local people from the archive onto the waves, perhaps onto a floating sheet backdrop, perhaps at night, use drone, need permission?
  • Littoral drift
    • The longshore transport of material such as shingle
    • Words such as littoral and drift conjure up useful associations, literal, drifting as in flaneur, drift in meaning – however careful not to base a project around a play on words!
    • A major influence on the Sussex seascape
    • Thousands of tonnes are transported back from Rye Harbour to Petts Level every year – could photograph this process
    • Can be represented by (b&w?) images of shingle and breakers?
    • Could also photograph the shingle directly – e.g. Paul Kenny https://paul-kenny.co.uk/gallery_283322.html particularly thinking of chittering (see glossary) although again not a new idea. Note Kenny uses scanography to bring a lot of vibrance to his imagery.
  • Time lapse of water flowing onto the Reserve and back – this process is vital for the health/biodiversity of the place
  • Time lapse of tide coming and going
  • A day in an hour – video representation of the different ways nature and humans experience time using the time lapses above – could be shown in the cafe on the reserve?
  • Home made map using GPS record of walks on the reserves along with photographs – perhaps something akin to the work of Sohei Nishino (see https://soheinishino.net/dioramamap) but this could be digital and clickable to reveal more information and allow the viewer to interact.
  • Also note the model of time as non-linear but a series of decision points. This looks a bit like a map of Rye Harbour with the iconic elements (huts, etc.) at the points where the paths intersect? Panoramas can be strung together to connect places in a line, but when the line becomes 2D it becomes a map – note models could be included to create a topographical map in 3D, although this might be too ambitious.
  • A different approach also based on a collage of imagery would be something akin to Kate Orff’s work with Richard Misrach (see https://photo515050level3.wordpress.com/2022/07/14/petrochemical-america/). In fact Rye Harbour uses information boards that are remarkably similar (and actually a lot clearer!) than those in Petrochemical America. However this does mean this has been done before, although it does not need to be done in exactly the same way. It could for example be digital and clickable as suggested in the previous bullet, maybe even available as an app that provides information to visitors a bit like an expanded Google Streetview.
  • Two channel audio of Rye Harbour birds and Rye Harbour cafe (in separate channels) to represent the conflict between humans and nature
  • Camera Obscura installion in pill box or bird hide – make a permanent record on a separate camera, and/or install photopaper to make a long exposure. Use as an educational tool as part of the Rye Harbour programme for children? Obviously would need permission and someone to work with … previous example I made with my son: https://contextandnarrative515050.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/project-5-the-manipulated-image/
  • Installation on board of how it used to be – inspired by one at Rye Harbour Reserve but also by Nick Brandt https://www.inheritthedust.com/, but this is not a new idea?
  • The word palimpsest has come up several times in my research, including in descriptions of the Rye Harbour landscape and suggestions from student group meetings. Referenced artists include Idris Kahn (https://www.skny.com/artists/idris-khan?view=slider#33) , Corinne Vionnet (https://corinnevionnet.com/) and Pep Ventosa (https://www.pepventosa.com/) . So one way of representing aspects of the landscape that have been covered many times, such as the Red Hut, might be to use this technique of photographing from many angles. This could also be used for the Castle, the Martello tower, would create something different and painterly and also tie in with opinions about the landscape. It could also develop into a dissertation subject… Another utilisation would be to combine different objects (such as Castle and Tower) that used to be on the coast but are no longer, re-imagining them on the (now) coast…
  • A related idea from the student groups is to use overlays in some way – these could represent change (such as change in landscape due to littoral drift or the silting up of coastal harbours and towns).
  • Augmented reality could also be used to represent change or position objects in the landscape where they used to be (e.g. the castle near the sea). I am not sure the technology has evolved beyond being a gimmick at the moment, but see my review of Burtynsky’s work for an example: https://photo515050level3.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/edward-burtynsky/
  • Image compare of red hut (although not expandable?) see https://photo515050level3.wordpress.com/2022/08/11/3-rye-harbour-continued/
  • Cinemagraph to show landscape “in motion” around iconic objects and/or flowers. Rye can be a windy place so this will create the motion, but it is also a very flat place so depending on the angle there might not be much to move? Would work for low lying plants, possibly the Martello Tower and the second Red Hut, could use the sky for more exposed objects (e.g. castle, red hut) maybe with rain, could use the sea coming in towards the Old Lifeboat Station?
  • GIFF of two or more red huts – as well as a garden shed version I have discovered model versions are available to buy …
  • Photographs of places (e.g. red hut) at 1/100 sec, 1/10 sec, 1 sec, 1 minute, 1 hour etc. The first might exclude people. Then people appears as increasingly blurred shadows before eventually ceasing to have importance in the landscape.
  • Follow the old path of the River Rye. Photograph a river that is not there.
  • Further to discussions on who decides how the Reserve looks, the names of the agencies involved could be added to images as an overlay, or perhaps “designed by” …, or on prints a watermark could be prominently used?

IMAGES

I started off making a fairly straight record of what I found, but looking for signs of interaction between human and landscape. I was working in colour, using a tripod and looking for juxtapositions. I also used signs in the landscape, particularly the Reserve information boards which are in some cases similar to the work of Kate Orff (and in others to that of Nick Brandt). While I have come to prefer a slower way of working preferable, it has been pointed out to me before (for example by Mimi Mollica at a workshop in Sicily) that this reduces my work rate quite a lot and also the number of ways I tend to explore a subject once I encounter it. It does have the advantage of making me think more about composition and increasing the quality of the images. However for an exploratory visit I think this was the wrong option.

For the second visit I worked handheld and covered more ground. When I reached the old lifeboat station in particular I also began to think more in black and white – this is also my preferred way of working, although when I first approached the subject I had assumed I would work in colour, perhaps influenced by the red hut and the vibrant colours in the sunshine.

Reviewing some of these images with a student group, I was interested to find the group fairly unanimous in recommending I continued in b&w (normally I have the reverse problem!) , which they felt was yielding much stronger images. The feeling was that the attempts at juxtaposition were too obvious and that a less direct or more abstract approach might work better.

For my third visit I worked a bit more on panoramas (see above), but was drawn more back to the shingle shore and images of breakers and pebbles, and to thinking in b&w. This may be the weather on the day and in any case I must be careful not to simply be drawn to the aesthetic. Aligning horizontals in some of these images seemed to emphasise the issue and introduce an almost surreal aspect. In others the breakers seemed to truly represent defences, even starting to look like gun placements.

The Old Lifeboat Station, scene of the greatest disaster in RNLI history when the Mary Stanford went down with all hands, can be seen in all four of the images directly above and is a feature of the landscape that retains a presence from many aspects due to the flatness of the terrain.

Reflecting on the work so far, my concern at this stage might be that I am creating aesthetic, dramatic b&w photos on a beach and justifying them within the context of littoral drift. Does them meaning carry beyond b&w shore shots? Am I adding anything by doing this?

I also increasingly found parts of dead birds which made interesting foregrounds or (gruesome) patterns in their own right, which could be read as casualties in the battle of compromise between human and nature although of course I do not know the cause of death and it could be very different (research?)

ADDED 4.8.2022 – PALIMPSEST EXPERIMENT

This was a practice in my garden, inspired by the work of Pep Ventosa and the palimpsest reference/idea above with respect to the changes in the landscape. This was photographed from 16 different angles and combined in layers to create a more nuanced view, with the landscape shifting around a structure that has become uncertain and more dimensional.

Isolation hut – used to store ammunition on an army base during the war

AUDIO

I made an initial attempt at recording the audio idea, just using my phone. There was a lot of wind noise on the outside recording of the birds, some of which I have managed to strip out, and I cannot load audio up to this free blog site, but you can get an idea from this location on my website. Not sure what I will do with this yet, just experimenting: https://www.jonathanlambphotography.com/ryeharbour

RESOURCES

I collected a number of resources from the Discovery Centre:

I also found the following on a charity website, although it may be a bit detailed for practical purposes:

  • Draper, G. (2009) Rye – A History of a Sussex Cinque Port to 1660. Cornwall: The History Press

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