Traces of Brighton Beach

Publication, 2021
Supervised by Dane Kerr


Traces of Brighton Beach explores the textures and colours that represent the relaxed and laidback lifestyle of Brighton Beach. While making my observations of Brighton Beach, I accumulated a variety of photographs, sounds, word generation and sketches of the people I was observing. I decided to focus on the photographs of footprints in the sand and other textures such as worn wood and terracotta rocks.

Some are zoomed in focusing on the details of these textures more closely while others are at more of a distance showing the variety of how the textures are constantly changing. I was fascinated with how many differing textures exist at the beach and was also interested in the story that they tell. The appearances of wood for example, would change dramatically from one area to another and the thought about this texture changing over time creates a forever changing and contrasting visual language. While focusing on a mixture of textures that I observed at Brighton Beach, I particularly wanted to focus on sand prints. These prints are also forever changing and I wanted to include them mainly to prompt viewers to wonder who walked here?

I also wanted to incorporate colour graphically as this vibrancy is very recognisable as Brighton Beach. I took inspiration from the patterns and colours of the beach boxes, all of which are different. I communicated this in my publication, accompanied with the texture photographs, ensuring that the layouts, colours and patterns of each spread are all visually different from each other.