I have spent less time photographing these past few months.
Life has been asking different things of me. There have been workshops to prepare, conversations to hold, courses to build, books to edit and photographers whose work I’ve had the privilege of sitting with. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I realised it wasn't the camera that had become quieter. It was me.
I’ll be honest, for a while, I worried.
Photography has always been how I make sense of the world. If I wasn’t making photographs, I wondered whether I was still paying attention.
I’ve found myself walking through Brighton without much intention of photographing it. Instead, I’ve been listening.
To the gulls before I see them. To the sea dragging itself over the pebbles. To the buses breathing at traffic lights. To conversations carried briefly on the wind before disappearing again.
The strange rhythm of a city I now know well enough to recognise with my eyes closed. I’ve been acquainting myself with its sounds.
For all the years I’ve spent thinking about photographs, I’ve realised how rarely I’ve thought about how they sound.
Photography asks us to privilege sight. It teaches us to trust what we can see. But places don’t first reveal themselves visually. They announce themselves through atmosphere. Through rhythm. Through smell. Through repetition. Through the sounds that become so familiar we stop hearing them.
I like the idea that every place has a soundtrack long before it becomes an image.
The gull has become my unlikely companion. Brighton's loudest and most mischievous resident. It interrupts conversations, steals sandwiches and punctuates almost every silence. Territorial and impossible to separate from the city, its cry has become part of the landscape itself.
The more I listen, the more I find myself wanting to photograph it. Not simply as a bird, but as a way of thinking about place. About community. About belonging. About what becomes so embedded within the fabric of a place that we no longer notice it until we leave.
The photographs, videos and audio recordings I am gathering are still tentative. I’m not entirely sure where they’re leading me yet. I rarely am. But I’ve learnt not to rush that uncertainty.
Looking up at the sky while chasing seagulls, I’ve been thinking a great deal about the limits of the photograph. I find myself asking it to do less on its own.
For years, my practice has circled memory, displacement, revolution, grief, home. Increasingly, I feel drawn to what exists around the still image rather than inside it. Sound. Movement. Fragments of conversation. The pace of walking. The spaces between photographs. The questions a photograph proposes and the bits the frame doesn’t reveal. Every image can be continued.
Are photographs sometimes carrying more than we ask of any other form?
I’ve begun recording the city as often as I photograph it. Not to replace the still image. To accompany it. To let one medium lean gently against another.
Looking back, I realise this piece began several months ago. In my last letter, I wrote about The Fear of the Last Photograph. About not making enough work. About worrying that life had begun crowding out the practice.
I don’t know where this series will end up yet. I only know that it has changed the way I pay attention.
I walk more slowly now. I stop more often. I wait.
A few months ago, I worried that I wasn’t making enough photographs. Now I wonder if the photographs were already beginning before I ever reached for the camera. Somewhere between the cry of a gull and the sound of the tide pulling itself back across the pebbles, something shifts.
Not every encounter needs to become a photograph. But every photograph, I think, begins with an encounter.
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A song for this piece:
Says, Nils Frahm
Listen on Spotify