On the Edge

Global warming and rising sea levels is changing the British coastline dramatically, causing part of the east and south coast to erode faster than ever before.
The battle with the sea is costly, with millions of pounds being spent on sea defences. Now the U.K government says it can not afford to defend the whole of the coast. This new policy, dubbed ‘managed retreat’ by scientists, means making difficult decisions about what land to save and what to sacrifice. Natural and cultural heritage is being lost and people of small villages such as Happisburgh in Norfolk and Skipsea in Yorkshire face no other choice than to abandon their homes to the sea. No compensation is offered for land or property lost due to coastal erosion; life along the sea has proved risky.

As the sea is moving further in, it is constantly reshaping the edge of Britain and redefining the borders as we know them.
This set of photographs looks at the land that has been left defenceless - soon to be claimed by the sea.

Fairlight

Fairlight, East Sussex

The tide was out and the sky was bleak - finally I got some pictures.

I have been agonising for weeks over how to present this project, partly because I don't feel that it is finished and also because ideally in the non virtual if I were to present it, I would hang a set of large prints on the wall (probably only about six images) and use some of the affected peoples stories and comments together with facts. I still have no real solution to the presentation and have been playing around with different layouts for a pdf and have just discarded all of it... so it is fare to say that I'm going a bit crazy. I'm a very hesitant editor of my own work and at the same time a real control freak.

Sea Change

I'm reading a great book called Sea Change - Britain's Coastal Catastrophe by Richard Girling at the moment. Girling has dedicated a chapter to erosion and discusses many of the problems and conflicts involved.

Changing Landscapes

Broken Line - Olaf Otto Becker

A while back, I picked up a book entitled Vanishing landscapes, that I keep going back to again and again. All the photographers included in the book have documented landscapes that are undergoing change in some way. Olaf Otto Becker's work Broken Line covers 4000km along the west coast of Greenland, documenting the melting ice. Each image has the GPS location in the title. There is more amazing images on his website that has not been included in this book.

Jem Southam's Rockfalls are very much forming a typological study and are essentially of coastal erosion. Over the past 15 years he have kept revisiting the same location, studying the gradual changes of the rock surface. Seesaw magazine has a good interview with him about his work.

Rockfalls - Jem Southam

More stories from the cliff edge

Shanty Town in Skipsea, Yorkshire is a fascinating place - a row of chalets made out of wood and some train waggons. The buildings are literally sitting a few meters from the edge and many has fallen in to the sea over the years. Recently the residents have got planning permission to build 70 meters or so back from the cliff edge, so they should be safe for a bit longer. I met Trevor who have had to cut his house in half to save it from the sea. He says the salt water destroys everything and he can't keep up with the paint work or justify spending money on it.

Saffron is an Sculptor who have made Skipsea her home, she had an exhibition in Hull last year titled: Tides of R-Evolution that was about the community and their relationship with the environment. Now Saffron will be building an Eco house made out of straw bales on the land behind her present house. I also met a lady called Janet who had old postcards from Skipsea in the 1950's - a whole road and street of houses have disappeared into the sea since then. Janet's family had a caravan there back then but that land is long gone. Janet has a real interest in the erosion and dug out a load of photographs she had taken over the years. Her house is about 1 km inland and she told me she did not buy a house nearer the sea because of the erosion. Her perspective is interesting because she is not directly affected but she knows most of the people in the village who are. She is sympathetic but she also points out that there are people who bought big nice houses for a lot less than the actual prize in the area just because of the risk of erosion. The problem seem to be that they have been told that the erosion is a lot less than it actually is in some places, an average is measured in studies and can not foresee that several meters will just suddenly disappear. It seems clear that nobody really knows, their are so many different theories about sea defences, what works and what doesn't. Sea defences in one place speeds up erosion further down the coast where there are non. It is not just the sea who contributes to erosion, it is just as much the surfaces water coming of the cliffs.

I have been struggling to find people to participate in the project. I just feel that it is to intrusive to knock on people's doors, that the issue is a bit sensitive. John suggested in one of our tutorials that I write a letter and drop through people's letter boxes - a great idea that for some weird reason never crossed my mind. Thanks to having printed photographs to give and a letter explaining what I'm doing, it was a lot easier to get talking to people. I met many people outside because the weather was nice. Some people were happy to be interviewed but not photographed which is fine because their stories are fascinating in itself.

I'm still not quite sure how the project will look when finished, the landscapes taken from the beach looking up seems to be the most effective. I took some pictures inside Saffron's house, I was interested to see how they would work together with the landscapes but it does not quite do it for me. Maybe I'm trying to do to many things... I really need to think about this, aesthetically it is not working. I'm not even sure the people shots fit with the landscapes but I so want them to.

Cow smuggling and India's new fence

Photographer Prashant Panjiar

Time Magazine published a really striking story about the Indian/ Bangladeshi border this week, titled ' A Great Divide' India is building a fence on its border with Bangladesh that will when finished encircle the whole of its smaller neighbour. The Indian government sees this as a necessary step against extremism but there are several other border issues, the biggest problem is cows smuggled from India over to Bangladesh. Since cows are sacred in India they can't be exported for slaughter but they are in great demand for food in Bangladesh. Dozens of Indians die every year trying to earn $22 for getting a cow across. The Indian Border Security Force (BSF) captured 70,000 cows last year.

I also found another border story, 'The Wall - Ahmedabad' by the same photographer as above.

Yorkshire and sound

The Holderness region in East Yorkshire has one of Europe's fastest eroding coastlines. The Alderborough area is estimated to erode as much as 3.8 metres a year. Walking the coast line there were bits of earth constantly falling off, creating a deep rumbling sound. It made me think of doing sound recordings of this, it all felt very athmospheric and there is also the constant sound of the sea. I'm not sure how difficult this would be to record yet, how near to the 'fall' I would have to be and then it is the sound of the wind to take into consideration. I saw an really interesting exhibition last year called Soundings from the Estuary that combined sound with images as well as text. The different sounds were playing on an constant loop in the gallery.

I found some good locations in Yorkshire that illustrates what I want to capture but the light was not right for most of the time, to much sunshine which does not fit with the bleak landscapes I want. I will make another trip for sure to get better light and there are still more locations in the Yorkshire area that I want to explore.
I'm looking for more people to include in the landscapes, people that are in some way affected. I want to interview them and use their stories/thoughts with the images. I think the writing could fit well with a set of landscapes and would hopefully add more understanding for how erosion is affecting peoples lives.

The right to defend your home

The court case of Peter Boggis, 77 fighting Natural England over if he should be allowed to continue building his sea defences to protect his home from falling in to the sea, in Easton Bavents, Suffolk got quite a lot of coverage in the national papers on 6th December.

Articles:

The Independent: 'Tide turns in favour of DIY sea barrier'

The Guardian: 'Coastal campaigner wins legal battle to save clifftop property'

The Times 'The Clifftop crusader wins his fight to repel the sea - by a technical knockout'

Natural England(a government body) argued that they want to make this stretch of coastline a 'Site of Specific Scientific Interest' (SSSI) and it should be allowed to erode naturally to reveal fossils etc. Boggis wants the right to protect his home, he has already put down 250,000 tonnes of clay in front of his house. This court battle also highlights the issue that 'if you don't allow someone to defend their own property then you must compensate them.' (The Times) This is something that is not happening in the U.K at the moment.

Research

It is not exactly on the theme of borders but I am looking at different stories at the moment that are somehow relating to what I am trying to do in order to find a working 'template' for my project. Some images that I have kept returning to over the past year is Gideon Mendel's photographs of last summers floods that affected many parts of the U.K. The images are interestingly juxtaposed with his images of floods in India that happened around the same time. They feel quite bizarre and yet so real. The work was published in the Guardian's G2 supplement last year and author Maggie Gee wrote a really intelligent and thought provoking article titled Drowned Worlds to accompany the images.

Missed exhibition

I found this postcard advertising an exhibition titled Borderspaces when visiting an exhibition at Photofusion. It ended Sunday so I missed it unfortunately. Did anybody else see it? Looking at the website it is nice to see that the theme has been interpreted in many different ways. Really gutted I didn't see it though, so many good photographers and it would have been interesting to see how it was put together in relation to what we are doing. Instead I just got myself wet and soggy down the coast with no good photographs!
However I did see Uta Kogelsberger's Bunker series which are fantastic to look at.

Some rough scans for today's tutorial

National Trust report

Changing shorelines, a report published by the National Trust, Britain's largest coastal landowner.
Changing Shorelines pamphlet

13m from the edge

Bryony

Diane

I have spent some days exploring parts of Norfolk coast that is badly affected by erosion. I stayed in Happisburgh, a small village which has lost most of its sea defences. Diane Wright bought Cliff house on Beach Road in Happisburgh over 20 years ago to run a B&B which she still does but the house is now only 13m away from the cliff edge. From the room I was staying in I could hear the sound of the waves, the windows were rattling in the wind and the rain pouring down outside. Diane has 3 m left to go until she will be forced to move out and the house will be demolished. She has grown used to the idea over the past few years but still feel it is unfair that the government is prepared to protect certain areas but not others. Diane said she bought the house in the belief that she would be protected.

Bryony next door, just moved in to her bungalow in July. 'I bought it in an act of defiance, I don't believe the sea should have the last word' she told me.

My trip was an attempt to try to start the project and get my head around the issues I want to focus on. Unfortunately I managed to take a lot of not very good pictures of subject matters that could have been very interesting. I feel really gutted over how crap my composition is at times, so unhappy with my horizons....I get in to a real state about things like this and end up chucking my negs in a draw, pretending they never happened, until I feel strong enough to face them and attempt to make better photographs. So feeling really quite unsure of the whole project, I haven't got a totally clear idea of how the project will look or how to precede and what is realistic to expect. At times I think perhaps I should focus on another idea I have about residual spaces, this would give me more freedom in terms of what I could include in the photographs. But I feel really quite strongly about the effect of these coastal landscapes and the people who inhabit them.

The project will definitely be a challenge for me, it is a more specific story from what I am used to photographing and is proving quite tricky in terms of how to physically shoot certain things. It is problematic photographing people and their houses on the edge. How to portray it? Only way of getting the houses and the people in would be to stand below the cliff shooting up, but one has to move far out in order to see the bungalows and the people would be tiny...
The broken sea defences look quite dramatic to me and I keep thinking they would look good shot on panoramic format, but I definitely don't want to shoot the whole project that way, mixing formats?... Anyway I put the above pictures up here to give you an idea of what I'm interested in conveying.

Norfolk

I'm heading up to Norfolk for a few days to have a look around areas affected by coastal erosion. I'm staying in Happisburgh, in a house that is very near the cliff edge which should make for an interesting experience. It looks like the weather should be grey with drizzly rain which suits my needs. I'm after some really bleak landscapes. I spend a lot of time on Google Earth looking at the coast line, so I have an idea about what to expect but it stands to see if the landscapes will be as dramatic as I imagine.

Border stories

Here are some photo stories that I really like that are about borders:

East of a new Eden Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya

http://albankakulya.com/docs/east_of_a_new_eden.pdf

People of Derry - Philippe Grollier

Abkhazia (Imagined States) - Eric Baudelaire

Trading over the Borderline - Guy Martin

The Middle Distance - Olivia Arthur

A lot of Paul Seawright's work deals with borders and the periphery.

Sacrificial Coast

I guess I originally thought that I would go back to Kaliningrad for my Borders story, being and enclave and cut off from the rest of Russia, border issues are a constant issue there. But I feel that I need a story I can revisit regularly and therefore it needs to be in Britain for the moment.


Land and people's relationship to the land interests me and is a theme that I keep returning to.
I came a cross an recently published book Vanishing landscapes which deals with the fact that landscapes will soon no longer exist the way we know them. John Bergers writing appears and work by photographers such as Edward Burtynsky , Joel Sternfield, and Robert Adams are featured.Photographer An - My Le has written some very thought provoking words in this book:

'While landmasses are carved up into jigsaw puzzles of nations, territories, and green zones, oceans define borders but defy politics. Against the backdrop of an ocean, any enterprise, military, commercial or scientific, appears fragile and barley tolerated.'

I really like this: 'oceans define borders but defy politics' This makes me think about Britain's eroding coastline. Certain parts of the coast especially in Norfolk is eroding faster than ever before. There are communities such as Happisburgh, Walcott, Mundesley that in the not so distant future might be completely swallowed up by the sea and wiped of the map. The U.K government says it is to costly to protect the whole of the coastline. 'Managed retreat' is the term scientists has given this approach, meaning that governments around the world are making decisions about what it can afford to save and what has to be sacrificed. A big part of the Norfolk coast seem to be out of luck, the sea defences are considered unsustainable and new ones will not be built. This mean that many people stand to loose their homes to the sea, farmers will loose their livelihood, historic sites and nature reserves will disappear. Unlike in countries like The Netherlands where compensation is given for loss of land to erosion, in the U.K there is no compensation. The effect the sea has on the land has become a political issue. How to decide what is protected and what is to be sacrificed? And there is talk of what could be Britain's first climate change refugees.
I want to visit these areas, photograph the landscapes and the people who belong to these places, not just Norfolk, though I think this might be a very good starting point but also other areas. At this stage I am quite open minded about what will be included. I could just focus on what I want to call 'Sacrificial Coast' or it could be extended to look at what is done to preserve and defend ourselves from the sea.

I would like to use statistics with these images and get quotes from people. My hope is that I can make some good connection with people living in these areas. In terms of making it in to a multimedia presentation I could perhaps use voice over from people talking about the situation or perhaps record the sound of the sea hitting the cliffs and use it as 'background music'. But right know I really need to delve deeper in to the research and check some places out.

Some very useful articles:

Waves of destruction The Guardian April 17 2008

Living on the edge The Guardian October 9 2006

As the climate changes, bits of England's coast crumble International Herald Tribune May 4 2007

Should we abandon Britain's crumbling coast? The Guardian August 18 2008

Living on the edge: The owners whose homes are going over a cliff Daily Mail 12 July 2008

Players at England's oldest golf course told to let it crumble into the sea The Guardian May 20 2008

Erosion plea from sea victims BBC News player

Wale's coastal erosion threat BBC News player

CCAG Coastal Concern Action Group