Four winters on one shingle bank

The shingle bank at Hask Bay is about two hundred metres long and, on a normal day, entirely uninteresting. It is a heap of rounded flint with a flat grey sea behind it. There is no feature, no framing device and nothing in it that would survive being described.

I have exposed ninety-six sheets of film on it in four winters and kept eleven prints.

Why this one

A storm beach is one of the few landforms that changes fast enough to photograph as a sequence and slowly enough that you can find it again. A surge rebuilds the crest in a night. The stones sort themselves by size as they go, which they do everywhere but rarely where you can stand on it the following morning.

The crest at Hask Bay has moved eleven metres landward since the first sheet. The stones at the north end are visibly smaller than they were. Neither of those is a thing I set out to record and both are in the pictures, because the pictures are all from the same place.

The tripod goes back in the same three holes

This is the whole method and it is not sophisticated. Three marks on the concrete of an old gun emplacement above the bank, one for each leg. Same height, same lens, same distance. On a 4×5 field camera that gets you to within a couple of centimetres, which is close enough that the frames stack.

The temptation, every single time, is to move. There is always a better composition forty metres down the beach, and there is, and it is worth nothing, because it is a photograph of a beach rather than a photograph of a change.

What ninety-six sheets actually buys

Not eleven good frames. It buys the ability to tell whether a frame is good, which is a different thing and took most of the first winter to develop.

By the second winter I could stand on the emplacement in flat light and know, before the film holder came out of the bag, that the bank had moved and in which direction. By the third I was throwing away frames that would have been the best thing I made in the first, not because they were worse, but because I had four of them already.

The eleventh print is the one where the crest has cut back into itself and left a metre of clean section, the only time in four years the inside of the bank has been visible. I would not have recognised it as the frame of the series if I had arrived that morning with no history. It looks like a hole in a heap of stones.

The cost

Two of the four winters produced nothing at all. That is the honest number and it is the one worth publishing, because a portfolio makes the process look efficient and it is not. Film, petrol, and a great many hours standing on concrete in a coat.