The Shape of Absence: Coastal Memory and Decay

Somebody named her. That's the part I can't get past. A boat doesn't christen itself — a person stood at this hull once, brush in hand, and chose five letters they wanted to see every time they walked down to the water. Tess. Not a registration number. Not a fleet designation. A name somebody loved enough to paint by hand, and precise enough that they clearly meant one particular person.

I found her beached on shingle under a sky the colour of wet slate, her bow split open like something that had been struck rather than simply aged. The ribs inside her were splintered outward, not inward — whatever took her apart did it from the inside, planks fracturing along the grain until the hold looked less like a boat and more like a ribcage picked over by the tide. And through all of it, through everything the sea and the years had done to strip her back to bare timber, that painted board had survived. Tess. Still legible. Still exactly where someone had fixed it, decades after everything else had given up holding its shape.

I didn't research her. I didn't want to. The moment I look her up, she becomes a fact — a registration, a decommission date, an owner's name in a harbour ledger somewhere. What I wanted was the question itself, kneeling on cold pebbles with the wind coming straight off the water, cataloguing every plank while one word refused to answer me. Who was she? A wife. A daughter. A boat named for a woman who never once set foot on the thing, the way men who work the sea sometimes name their vessels after the people they leave behind on land every time they go out. I'll never know, and I've stopped wanting to. The not-knowing is the photograph.

This is the question at the centre of The Shape of Absence, the collection this image belongs to — photographs built around exactly this kind of gap, where the object survives and the person it was made for or named after does not. Black and white strips away anything that might soften that gap. There's no rust-colour to admire here, no warm evening light to distract the eye. Just timber, stone, sky, and one word that refused to rot.

It sits close in spirit to the wrecks I photographed along the Jurassic Coast, where the same question kept surfacing — what happens to a thing once its purpose is gone, but its identity remains stubbornly intact. And it belongs to the broader instinct behind everything I shoot, the one I try to explain properly on what draws me there — the pull toward places and objects that are still, in some quiet and stubborn way, holding on to who they were.

I don't think Tess needs an answer. I think she needs to be looked at, properly, by people who will ask the same question I did and let it stay unresolved. That's what a print does that a passing glance on a beach can't. It holds the question still long enough for someone else to sit with it.