From San Diego To St Helens… Stephen Clarke’s End Of The Season
Cian Quayle inspects the home footage, black and white photography and hand-drawn maps that embody Stephen Clarke’s personal, family-orientated homage to seaside towns…
Stephen Clarke has recently published a series of three books with Café Royal: Ocean Beach Rhyl, Rhyl Caravan Parks and Rhyl Seafront, all featuring photographs made between 1984 and 1985. End Of The Season at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester is based on these books. The Café Royal imprint is the enterprise of Craig Atkinson, who has single-handedly resurrected, what could loosely be described as the lost histories of British documentary photography.
As a publishing venture Atkinson’s modest photobooks, which are all uniform in size and format, reportedly find their inspiration in the National Trust’s Guidebooks. Clarke is apologetic; he does not describe himself as a photographer but he openly acknowledges the relationship between his experience growing up in St Helens and Warrington and his memories of seaside holidays. This locates the work in a particular time frame where his childhood and formative years, art college education in Newport and Winchester, subsequent artist practice incorporating collage, and travel overseas, led Clarke to return to Rhyl.
Following graduation Clarke spent a period of time in South California where the influence of the New Topographic photographers, and his earlier introduction to Lewis Baltz at Newport in 1986, had an impact upon the way he approached that landscape. Of his oft cited influential experiences within art education, he even ended up meeting sculptor Douglas Huebler whilst looking for collagist John Baldessari at Cal Arts. The light of the California landscape is a far cry from the seaside light of Rhyl’s location at the extremity of the Welsh peninsula, but these photographs maybe present a substitute for what Clarke left behind.
The origin of this work is initially revisited via colour, cine-filmed, home-movie footage from 1960s and 1970s: family holidays in Rhyl. The cine footage is apparently not contrived but as found, and features the late, heyday of an ubiquitous British seaside resort. The carnival-queen winner, a parade of majorettes twirling their batons as they troop along the seafront, and the super 8 camera momentarily fixates on a white woman carrying a baby of mixed race or West Indian ethnicity.
Clarke is also seen aged 5 years old ambling along, holding his father’s hand. His father is later seen in the foreground of one of Clarke’s photographs in Rhyl from the 1980s, looking into the distance with his back to his son. Clarke’s grandparents are also present in the cine footage – proudly overseeing their two caravans in Rhyl as they did each summer season.
End Of The Season also includes a considerable collection of photographic and other printed ephemera as well as other family snapshots, which are displayed across three vitrine cases. The display cases include vintage photographs, which preceded the recent publications and new prints made for this exhibition by Steve McCoy and Stephanie Wynne. Clarke has previously also collaborated with artist and collagist David Ferry, whose own preoccupation with the British seaside and Blackpool was an influence for Clarke’s forays into collage and montage. This subsidiary material draws attention away from the three series of framed black and white photographs on the walls, which anchor the exhibition, and each suite of prints relates to each of the books already mentioned. A series of digitally montaged postcard images also function as an off-kilter rejoinder to the other works on display.
A hand-drawn map, which was made in situ during the exhibition, performs a repeat strategy that Clarke has previously adopted. In this instance, it involves replacing street names with the names of other seaside resorts, which will ultimately form part of a continuing investigation of the British seaside. How viable or necessary this is, following those landmark bodies of work which are already acknowledged as the pinnacle of this form of documentary, are perhaps most recently best represented in the exhibition of Tony Ray-Jones, Only In England (Walker Gallery, Liverpool), curated by Martin Parr.
The final selection of photographs, which closes the exhibition, presents a constellation of other images of other seaside towns in which Clarke has photographed. These include Bexhill, Hastings, Brighton and Robin Hoods Bay. Here we see some poignant moments where a boy dives off the end of a seaside jetty and rows of deckchairs laid out in anticipation of holidaymaker’s arrival.
The continuity of the project is of course a viable one – as the shifting identity of places and communities reveals new reasons to return to what might otherwise be perceived as an end point along the journey which a photographer’s life and work might follow.
The signage and motifs, which festoon the seafront, arcades and stalls all form part of the visual vocabulary and the stock-in-trade of any seaside resort. With their prospect of escapism providing a ubiquitous trope which is unavoidable and one to which, Clarke admits, he was initially drawn via American photographer Walker Evans. The photographs are by no means mundane as the human presence, which is sparse, activates a set of disconnected relations where individuals seem isolated from one another – absorbed in private moments of contemplation surveying something or someone out of frame. Elsewhere a child looks back at the photographer or another glances back at a passing adult.
This exhibition is tinted with nostalgia, which is heavily underscored by the array of fascinating, display-case material, but also what Clarke considers a melancholy sensibility. Clarke’s images, and the prints, which have been made by Wynne and McCoy, are unerringly, unforgiving in what they reveal about a place whose recent headlines provoke a slew of headlines related to poverty, debt, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness and dog shit. The calcified light, in these images is not that of Southern California, and they are documents, but emotive ones for Clarke, whose affinity with Rhyl persists for obvious reasons and associations.
Subsequent recessions have left Rhyl one of the most deprived areas in the North-West. The photographs represent a seaside town that is already undergoing a sea-change, which across the next 30 years led to what now seems like an irrecoverable downturn in the economy, shifting demographic and status. Rhyl today is blighted by a confluence of factors, which are an endemic reflection of successive governments failure to stem the tide of decline in industry, and inevitably tourism. The boarding houses, which have not been demolished, backdrop the promenade entertainments, providing temporary accommodation for the shifting tide of communities which have depended for so long on seasonal tourism where the end of season signalled the need for the working population to either sign-on, or seek out work elsewhere in the region or further afield.
With the increase in unemployment, poverty and debt afflicting the majority of Rhyl’s population, both young and the elderly, the longer-term depopulation and immobility of a disenfranchised community has been supplanted by the influx of a migrant population. A migrant work force have been attracted by what work can still be found in the hotel and leisure industries, and it could be supposed that for Steve Clarke, and the communities of other seaside towns, that the season has not quite come to an end – just yet.
Cian Quayle
Cian Quayle is Programme Leader for BA Photography at the University of Chester and was in conversation with Steve Clarke at the Grosvenor Museum on Friday 9 October 2015
See Stephen Clarke’s End Of The Season at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, curated by Lucy Ashdown, until Sunday 18 October 2015 — all images courtesy the artist
Clarke is a contributing writer to The Double Negative: read his articles here, including a feature on Cian Quayle’s 2014 exhibition Points Of Departure at the Grosvenor Museum
Clarke’s book can be found at Café Royal Books – Rhyl Caravan Parks, Rhyl Seafront – and at The Velvet Cell – California Shopfronts Vol.I and Vol.II