Southend Rose

Made over the course of a spring and summer in Southend-on-Sea, Southend Rose grew out of my continuing interest in the lives and possibilities that exist within places often overlooked. Following Love’s Fire Song, I wanted to explore a different kind of landscape, a distinctly English seaside town shaped by its history, its attractions and the stories it tells about itself.

Southend carries the promise of a kind of playground fantasy, a place of amusement, escape and imagined possibility. Its faded grandeur and references to a more glorious past sit alongside the everyday lives of its inhabitants. I became interested in the space between the town’s imagined identity and the reality of growing up there, particularly for its young people, whose futures remain uncertain within a place so closely tied to memories of what once was.

Returning repeatedly with my camera, travelling by train and photographing on film, I worked from early spring into the middle of summer, allowing the changing light and atmosphere to shape the photographs. I was drawn to moments that seemed to hold something beyond themselves, where the ordinary could become quietly cinematic and individual lives could suggest a larger, unfolding story.

Southend Rose is a portrait of a place suspended between nostalgia and possibility. Beneath the promise of its amusements and the mythology of its past, the photographs look towards the people who inhabit it now, and the hopes, uncertainties and private worlds they carry with them.