Anthropology and Archaeology

 

 

Images taken on the East Coast of England. I took them without people. This was a deliberate choice: focussing on formal elements and wanting to give a sense of isolation both geographically and socially. The locations are both Skegness and Cleethorpes off-season, East England coastal holiday towns that have seen better times. As I was doing this, it came to me that removing the people does not remove the human element. What it does is it turns the immediately anthropological to a latent archaeology. What I mean by this is simply that, anthropology is the study of living populations, archaeology the study of what is left after they are no longer present. Both fields try to throw light on how people behave and the causes for that behaviour. The pictures give me the sense of something that has been left behind with the potential to form a future archaeology even if only in images.

I was struck by this relationship between what is present and what is gone while focussing on the structures and environment: the correspondences between the visitors, the infrastructure and their respective purposes and their provenances. The two seaside resorts were built up as holiday destinations for the workers of the industrial Midlands and South Yorkshire. They are places of fun and relaxation yet, the very structures that were built to fulfil this functions reflect the machinery and structures of heavy and manufacturing industries: steel, coal, mechanised production lines in the rows and rows of penny arcades, roller coasters and helter skelters, ferris wheels and paddle boats, Even the restaurants and cafe’s are reminiscent of factory canteens. This is the industrialisation of leisure that followed the rise of the urban industrial society and catalysed by the mass transport of the railways in the C19th. Productive industry was directed to leisure using the same tools and knowhow. 

It is ironic that as such industries have declined over the decades, so too have the resort towns; and what were once bustling rail links have either disappeared, in the case of Skegness, or reduced to light traffic to Cleethorpes. The infrastructures of leisure and fun, entertainment and distraction engender in me a sense of an almost lost civilisation: settlements reduced largely as refuges for the less fortunate pushed to the margins of society and day trippers often intent on doing what they would not do elsewhere. 

I know this seems a bleak view of the areas but they do possess a poignant beauty rich in life where the sea meets the land, the future the past, and an indomitable desire to create a fantasy land still persists in the midst of struggle. And facing all this, growing legions of wind turbines, sentinels of new technology and power generation; replacing the old… at a distance both physical and metaphorical.