A mixture of candid street photography and found portraits, made on three city beaches: Bondi Beach, Coney Island and Miami Beach.
When I started this project I set out to explore what ‘the beach’ means to people, asking beachgoers to write down one word that they associate with this shared space. And there were so many: childhood, escapism, democracy, beauty, chaos, arrogance, relationships. memories, tradition, routine, family community… The list goes on.
The beach gives us the man in the street. It belongs to everyone. It represents diversity and freedom. Is alive. There’s a timelessness to beach behaviour – certain rituals and recurring themes. At the same time it informs us on a changing social political and cultural landscape through bringing together people from many different tribes, with their personal activities and interactions, in a very public space. So the photographs become ethnographic studies of a place and time, with each location maintaining their own identities and behaviours, within the quirkiness of everyday life.