Shoreline
Text by Anna Stielau, 2018
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be---
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.[i]
The beach is a marginal space, literally and metaphorically. It demarcates the edge of a landmass, but it also represents a border between nature and culture, domestic and wild, known and unknown. It’s where the terrestrial world falls away. Interestingly, the word ‘margin’ was once a synonym for coast, although even that usage had an older Latin form, margo: to be at or on the brink. That’s a precarious position, and beaches are precarious sorts of places.
The idea of the beach as a holiday destination derives from this ambivalent character. It was proximity to a piece of “untamed and challenging nature” that drew Victorian visitors to seaside resorts via the new European railways, giving way to a bustling leisure industry that continues to thrive. [ii] Mortal danger was built into the business from the start, first by the environment, and second, by the health complications that motivated infirm tourists to seek it out. Fear sharpened the frayed nerves of city dwellers, while sea air and freezing water injected life into their bodies. “The early seaside holiday was much more akin to a battle,” writes Virginia Richter, “against the elements, against one’s own constitutional weakness, against the temptations of the flesh.”
You went to the water because it made you uncomfortable, not despite it. Anxiety was part of the deal.
At first glance, many of Vanessa Cowling’s seaside photographs seem anything but anxious. The beaches in them are idyllic, washed in the nostalgic colours of a faded childhood snapshot (or maybe an Instagram filter). The framing is easy, almost artless, and it reinforces this effect, lending the whole series an air of tenderness that shares more with family album than art object. Everywhere people are enjoying themselves and enjoying each other. On the sunny beaches outside Barcelona they lounge and picnic and tan, and in overcast Muizenberg, they meander and surf. Acknowledging this kind of fun is what holiday snapshots are for: they chronicle the shiny parts of our experience so that we can enjoy them again later (“pics or it didn’t happen”).
In preserving the good for posterity, though, holiday photos engage in a complicated dialogue with time. Documented moments are the preserve of the future – they already belong to a(n imagined) later self – meaning that the present they contain is always the future past. That’s what touches all photographs with pathos, or so says Susan Sontag; anxiety and remorse attend a subject that is, at the moment of its imaging, vanished into history.[iii] By drawing on tourist tropes and the instant nostalgia they entail, then, Cowling creates images whose wistful sweetness has a melancholy edge. Like those early tourists to the seaside, her figures are caught between worlds, at once resilient and fragile.
For all their formal similarities, these are not holiday snapshots. Almost by definition, the photograph as souvenir or keepsake singles out an object of contemplation. It’s necessarily prescriptive, telling us what (and who) is important and what (and how) to feel. Because Cowling’s primary tool of choice is a smartphone, her images are lower resolution – when they’re enlarged, fine details are lost. What remains are the broad strokes of a moment, with relationships between figures reduced to impressions. Lovers embrace in the waves, their faces unreadable. A small, genderless figure stands alone at the waterline. A father scolds or cajoles a child. The primary visual resemblance throughout is to watercolour painting or perhaps mirage: shape is foregrounded as specificity is lost, bringing with it attention to the subtleties of gesture and to the larger interpersonal intimacies that determine our use of, and presence in, public space. Anonymised by the medium, the holidaymakers are more like archetypes than individuals, suspended in the even light of a never-ending photographic afternoon. Their figures carry not particular but general meaning. It makes them oddly weightless, and more than a little unreal.
This unreality touches the space they inhabit, too, inasmuch as it is gilded by nostalgia. Nostalgia glosses over the rough edges of the past. When its cues are invested in images, they imbue everything with radiant sentiment, but also necessitate a suspension of disbelief. To be genuinely nostalgic – or to look at the world through the mass produced nostalgia of social media, whatever comes first – is to shrug off accuracy in favour of affect. With that in mind, the world Cowling depicts is something we can’t entirely believe in, and perhaps we aren’t supposed to.
Beaches aren’t just about the good life, after all. South Africa’s coast comes with some serious baggage. It was the frontline of the colonial encounter and a site of apartheid-era race-making; a place of segregation and violence. A world away, the racial homogeneity of the European coast can’t be wholly untethered from this history, or from the new ideological charge of the beach in the age of global migration. Today any photograph of a welcoming shore, no matter how innocent, is in conversation with all those who will not live to see it.
Crucially, the smallest details change the terms of Cowling’s engagement from a fetishization of the pleasures of an apolitical seaside to something more uneasy. Several images bear the tell-tale markings of the train window from which they were shot: a calibration runs down the edge of one frame, while on another, a smudged fingerprint betrays otherwise invisible glass. These marks don’t disrupt the landscape. If anything, each anchors the image more firmly to its location, otherwise as placeless as its people are de-individuated, and the photographs are more solid and substantial for it. Every imperfection reminds us that we are not only looking at, but through: through the glass of a window, through the lens of a camera or a smartphone, and through the eyes of someone else. This is not a beach…this is a point of view. Only a closing shutter maintains the illusion of stability or of access.
By comparison, the luminous seascapes seem to offer a view from exactly nowhere. They’re a perfect visual counterpoint to the busy sands of Spain and South Africa: cool, practically monochromatic and starkly minimalist. Hinged around the horizon, every representational element is reduced to its purest formal qualities. There is water and there is sky and there is light. Nothing more. Arguably, these photographs are as far removed from snapshots as possible. Where a snapshot is spontaneous, these are impeccably crafted long exposures in which duration is privileged over moment. Under strictly controlled conditions, waves become a nacreous band at the shoreline and the water’s surface swells like mercury. Whether tumultuous or flat and featureless, it’s always strange.
The sea in Cowling’s photographs is not tame. It is vast and deep.
In these otherworldly images, there is another complex engagement with photographic ontology at work. Much has been made of the magic of the “decisive moment” worshipped by modernists, a phrase coined by Henri Cartier-Bresson to describe the elusive contingency that results in a compelling picture. This “good” photograph requires patience, precision and timing. It makes for an event worth imaging and an image worth seeing. In Cowling’s seascapes, which are essentially eventless, this moment loses all meaning. The photographs represent large swathes of time, not instants, that don’t so much cut through the continuum of life as gently detach it from its normative logics.
Held in tension against the scale and indifference of this landscape, the bodies of beachgoers are made even more fragile. Their foothold in time – suggested by the photographic mode – is in direct contrast to the timelessness of the ocean. Their picturesque surroundings, all beach umbrellas and surfboards, are offset by the sublimity of the sea. Even the action of the camera reflects this distinction, figuring different relationships to land and to water. Though in motion along the beach, it is utterly still as it faces the sea. Stillness says enough.
Perhaps it was a mistake to imply that Cowling’s photographs are anxious. They’re not, really. The push and pull between water and land, the battle waged at the shoreline, is their primary subject and their power.
***
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep? [1]
[i] Frost, R., 1947. Neither Out Far Nor in Deep. University of California Press.
[ii] Kluwick, U. and Richter, V., 2016. The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures: Reading Littoral Space. Routledge.
[iii] Sontag, S., 1977. On Photography. Macmillan.