Mist, mirrors and the faintly absurd: Polly Braden reveals the reality behind Britain’s seaside cities

I’m proud to be a journalist, however not at all times pleased with my occupation. For instance, residing in a British coastal city, I’ve seen how newspaper stories 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.

Both tales often have their information proper, technically a minimum of. But the general image usually feels hopelessly alien to locals, myself included, largely as a result of it has been written from the skin, by somebody “looking in” for a fortnight at most.

Polly Braden’s new images exhibition Against the Tide, now open at Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol, does one thing completely different. Her goal was to actually get below the pores and skin of British seaside cities by handing some inventive management to the residents themselves.

Proper analysis

It’s all the results of greater than a 12 months of in-depth analysis. Polly and Guardian journalist Lisa Bachelor visited a spread of conventional seaside cities, speaking to 16- to 25-year-olds about what their lives are literally like.

This is neither the model that leads to a shiny council regeneration brochure, nor the one in a doom-laden newspaper characteristic concerning the “left behind”. Instead, 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 trustworthy solutions.

Unspoken stress

The press picture main the exhibition is a present to any image editor: a man in an Easter Bunny costume wanting forlorn, on a misty seashore in entrance of an ageing fairground experience. It’s humorous. It additionally factors to an uncomfortable fact about seaside Britain: that the infrastructure of old style enjoyable remains to be standing, even the place the old style enjoyable itself could have packed up and left.

That unstated stress runs by means of the entire present. Alongside large-format portraits of kids, shot with the sort of clear-eyed dignity Polly has constructed her profession on, there are photos of dressing-room mirrors, empty automotive parks, fairground wheels towards bruised skies, piers evoking grandeur by means of the fog.

It’s 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

Here’s the lesson, I feel, that creatives generally can draw right here. While documenting seaside cities usually descends into tiresome cliché, what rescues Against the Tide from that destiny is the sense of knowledgeable collaboration that runs by means of it.

Polly and Lisa did not simply flip up, take some candid photographs, after which run away. Instead, they held workshops in Weston-super-Mare, Blackpool, Whitehaven and Brightlingsea, the place children had been taught to take their very own pictures.

Those photos now sit alongside Polly’s within the present, and in a companion exhibition, Besides 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 haven’t any motive to ever cross paths.

Real voices, actual lives

“Co-creation” is commonly simply an empty advertising and marketing buzzword, however right here it is performed 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, “When I leave here, there’s always going to be a part of me that stays behind.” Michael from Blackpool pushes again exhausting towards the doom narrative: “So many good things are happening here, but nobody is telling those stories.” Millicent, in Tendring, says all of it when she says: “On one hand, there’s not much here. But my house is right on the seafront. I just love that.”

None of this, importantly, reads as scripted. All of it reads because the sort of nuance that takes a 12 months of precise presence to earn.

For anybody whose work entails telling different individuals’s tales for a residing, it is well 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 truly cease and look.