Week One
Checking out the nearest seaside resorts to home, and it turns out that New Brighton is among them – close enough for an afternoon trip. Seems quite serendipitous as Martin Parr’s Last Resort is one of the reasons I was attracted to this project. A few hours in New Brighton and along the southerly coast of the Wirral yielded a few possible starting points. The advantage of New Brighton being so close is that if one of the stories does develop here then it is easy to get back to at numerous different times. I didn’t see anything that suggested a story, except perhaps something to do with the multicoloured benches along the front that have become memorials in some way – lots have flowers and such on them making them pretty much useless as benches.
The decrepitude of the resort very much feeds into the idea of wabi sabi – in particular the idea of impermanence underlined by the benches and their memorials and the flaking paint and plaster of many of the buildings.
I think the last shot of the empty noticeboard would be a good starting point!
Week Two
A trip to see friends in Yeovil gave me the chance to visit Minehead for a night on the way down and Weston-super-Mare and Burnham-on-Sea on the way back. Again, more possible atmosphere building, but it still feels like the tail end of summer rather than the proper start of the off season.
One possibility that raised its head here for the purposes of a narrative could be a caretaker at Butlins who sees the off-season as both alluring (no people to clean up after) and depressing (no people at all). There was an 80s music weekend on this weekend, but it would be worth checking what happens here on the weekends where there is nothing on and whether it would be possible to gain access. Equally, might be worth checking for holiday camps closer to home – Southport or Prestatyn though they are both Pontins rather than Butlins. Not sure how much a difference that would make, but Butlins seems to have a lot more infrastructure that would make a visual statement against the emptiness of the off-season. The emptiness overall is very wabi sabi, and the feeling of mono no aware is heightened by shooting at dusk.
Week Three
Blackpool! Again, still very lively for what I am hoping to achieve, but I suspect given its proximity and the fact that it is the most seaside-y of the British seaside resorts, I suspect there will be more trips. Though, to be honest, two days was more than enough, personally speaking.
I think Blackpool will have to be one of the six stories. The trick is to avoid the obvious narratives of booze and fights. The place was actually heaving with the illuminations being on – will have to come back when it is quieter. One interesting angle might be from the point of view of one of the people who work there – not seasonal staff but people who are stuck there in the winter too. The guy who ran the hotel I stayed in said it was a weird time of year – either too busy or too dead. He used to run a hotel in the Netherlands but he said there isn’t the seaside culture there that there is here so it’s not really comparable. Interesting, but not sure if that sums up the feeling of Blackpool. I did get some very good audio field recordings – lots of seaside music and fairground sounds as well as gulls and waves.
Week Four
A night in Southport this week – more upmarket than Blackpool (not difficult) and strangely un-seaside like, despite having a pier and a fairground. Much more a town that happens to be on the coast. Still, some potentially useable shots. The field recordings were noticeably different from Blackpool – it really doesn’t sound much like I would have expected a seaside town to sound, amusement arcades aside. I also noticed a lot of signs up for a missing teenager – notable juxtaposition to the people trying to have fun – the real world intruding on their holidays. I aimed again to shoot in the late afternoon/early evening as the idea and mood of fading daylight and long shadows ties into the wabi sabi feeling of ephemerality that I am trying to promote.
Weeks Five and Six
Nine days off work, so headed over to the East Coast to travel from Skegness to Felixstowe (taking in a football match at the mighty Ipswich Town on the way).
A wide range of seaside experiences – the rough drama of Skegness (does the name make the place seem worse than it actually is?) and the Butlins at Ingoldmells was like a smaller Blackpool. Cromer was quaintly melancholic; Yarmouth and Lowestoft and the small caravan-based resorts around them were typically depressed, down-at-heel provincial towns, then the stretch of braying middle-class territory through Southwold and Aldeburgh where you’d get lynched if you carried a bucket and spade. Felixstowe was much as I remembered it as a kid though like Southport with some separation between town and seaside.
One thing occurs – I am getting some decent, useable shots from numerous different places that I will not be able to use if I just concentrate on six different resorts. Certainly for this one it might be an idea to broaden the scope to an area – perhaps an itinerant seaside worker (amusement arcade technician?) that moves between several resorts in the same area.
Week Seven
A weekend trip to Llandudno – similar to Southport in that it isn’t what you might call traditionally seaside-y. In conversations with Wendy, the idea of class often arises – the more middle-class resorts have a palpably different feel to the traditionally working class ones. I’m not sure how best to approach this – perhaps it is a large enough theme to become central. And yet this isn’t the thing that I was looking for when I started this project – I am more interested in the atmosphere of these places and how their central raison d’etre is missing for half the year. One way might be to accentuate the difference in two different stories – Blackpool v Southport or Llandudno v Rhyl. I did notice a Staffordshire Oatcake shop here in Llandudno – they clearly have a lot of visitors from The Potteries as I’ve never seen them sold outside of Stoke. On the plus side I got a better shot of the weird hotdog-man character I first met in back in Blackpool!
The manager of the hotel was somewhat fatalistic about the future – far too many hotels and not enough people – and didn’t think that Brexit would change things very much. She was most worried that they’d have to start taking in homeless and vulnerable people to fill the rooms and stay open and turn into Rhyl. Something that would definitely be worth asking should I go to Rhyl, and also I have heard the same said about Blackpool – I sense further visits there may be inevitable.
I also managed a trip to Pwllheli and the house my dad was born in, the house we visited my grandma in all through my childhood and the church in which I was christened. As Pwllheli is one of the reasons I have always been interested in the seaside (particularly off season) I was surprised to find out just how non-seasidey it is – the beach is a long walk from the town and the beach cafe is closed now. Perhaps it is because the Butlins there is no longer a Butlins (as a staple part of my childhood and the employer of every male Simon up to (but not including) myself, that’s a disappointment all on its own).
Week Eight
As delightful as Whitby is, it is the least seasidey of the places visited so far – though there is a beach, the town itself is much more concerned with fishing and non-seaside tourism (perhaps in the summer it is noticeable that people come to see the sea, but certainly not in the winter). Of the several holidaymakers I spoke to, only one had any intention of actually going down to the beach. One was there for the lantern parade and the others just came because they like Whitby and for the fish and chips. The trip up the coast, taking in Saltburn and Redcar was much more useful – both much more traditional (the separation between town and beach in Saltburn narrowed by the funicular) and, in the case of Redcar certainly, the trappings of the British seaside are very much there but the decline is palpable (the Victorian terrace of what once were guest houses along the sea front now mostly nursing homes and run down flats; the Regent Cinema (all that remains of the pier) boarded up). And yet the beach is magnificent, albeit with the impressive backdrop of now defunct steelworks (the best visual metaphor I have found yet of the idea of the seaside being a place where you can blank out reality, however close it may be).
It did occur to me after the trip that I seem to have stopped consciously pursuing the concepts of wabi sabi and mono no aware – nevertheless they arise organically from the subject matter.
Week Nine
Exmouth/Torquay/Paignton. Again, a noticeable difference in ambiance, though probably not noticeable enough for each to be a separate project. It might help to define what I think of as ‘seasidey’. The lack of a pier makes a difference (though Southport and Felixstowe both have them and don’t have the seasidey vibe). Class makes a difference, with the more seasidey places being the more traditionally working class. Perhaps this stems from behaviour and expectations. The book I have started reading (see Contextual Research) defines seaside resorts as being characterised by liminal behaviour – sexual and social mores are traditionally relaxed. There seems to be a distinct difference in feel between out-and-out seaside resorts that grew in response to the change in social conditions brought about by the industrial revolution, and towns that perhaps were already established by the sea (port towns, fishing towns) and were able to cash in on the Georgian/Victorian fashions – worth researching further.
Exmouth I know (knew) relatively well as my first teaching job twenty-odd years ago was in the town. It always had a strange (and occasionally violent) dynamic as (at least in the summer) there is a combination of ‘townies’, tourists, squaddies from the Royal Marine training barracks up the road and students at the Plymouth Uni outpost. The sea and beach are important parts of the town, but it lacks most of the other trapping of seaside resorts (no pier, only one arcade, few shops selling seaside-type souvenirs/equipment). Torquay is one of the big traditionally Victorian getaways, but again, certainly in the winter, little is made of the beach. Paignton is the most seasidey of the lot, having a pier. Speaking to several members of the hotel staff in Torquay, they confirmed that many guests come to visit Torquay (and the idea of Torquay) rather than specifically to go to the beach.
On the journey back I was able to make a detour to Newquay which does have a distinct enough feeling to be an episode/zine in itself given its status as a surf town. I didn’t have enough time to do have than a quick look round, but it will be worth coming back to once I finalise which places to use for the six zines. I also briefly visited Nansledan, Prince Charles’ new ‘traditional’ village, which is an excellent metaphor for how the seaside holds on to nostalgia for an idealised past.
It does occur to me that perhaps to understand the idea of the British seaside resort off season, I need to better understand what these places are like on-season, though it’s a bit late for that now. People I spoke to in both Torquay and Exmouth said that in the summer, obviously, the beaches are busy, though neither place has the supporting infrastructure (ie lots of beach cafes, pubs, shops, kiosks) that places like Blackpool and Weston-super-Mare do.
Week Ten
Another trip to Blackpool – staying in a different area (town centre rather than South Beach). With the change in focus to looking at six different seaside liminalities rather than six different seaside resorts, I was more clearly able to target what I was looking for: primarily evidence of keeping reality at bay, teenage boredom and the anything-goes seaside mentality. A drive round skate parks proved more fruitful than I could have hoped with graffiti that is so on-the-nose I could have painted it there myself for the purposes of the project.
There were plenty of usable ideas, particularly in terms of the disparity between places designed for large crowds and their actual emptiness:
There being nothing to do for teenagers (a point driven home by the car-based party that was going on in the covered car park (out of the rain) as I walked past):
And the sort of behaviour and activities that are rarely seen outside of the seaside:
I also managed a trip to Morecambe for a few hours. Though I was at uni nearby, I remember little of Morecambe. As it turned out, there was little to remember. A visit to a caravan park where the Pontins used to be beside Heysham nuclear power station provided a view that illustrates the wilful ignorance of real life when on holiday (though it may prove to similar in terms of the idea behind it to the photos of Redcar beach by the steelworks and the Felixstowe caravan park next to the container port) along with a couple of other ideas that may be useful:
Week Eleven
Finally made it to Rhyl to discover there is very little there. It is clearly in a state of flux, with a new Sun Centre and much other building work going on in preparation for the summer. The hotel (I always try to stay in the grand old Victorian ones) was very down at heel and, as predicted by the woman in Llandudno, was used to house vulnerable members of society. As the woman behind the counter quite rightly pointed out, “everyone deserves a roof over their head. Plus it keeps this place open”.
The idea that there was nothing to do for youngsters was a tested a bit by venturing out into a fairly stormy night to take photos of the neon-lit beach shelters (apparently to stop junkies being able to find their veins) when the shelter I chose to photograph turned out to have a couple having sex therein.
Though the only thing I could see (sex aside) for young people to do was a church-run youth club, which despite its wildly optimistic name didn’t seem like the last word on high-jinks.
Colwyn Bay literally separates the town and the beach with both a railway line and a cliff. There was a useful visual metaphor in the public art installation on the beach:
One of the people I spoke to there expressed the idea that the town was dying, and that all the shops were “either shut or they’ve turned into charity shops. And everything else is a Wetherspoons”. This could well be an idea to pursue, perhaps in terms of liminality of function, or era – the cinema in Colwyn Bay and the theatre in Llandudno down the road are both now Wetherspoons, reflecting perhaps the changing idea of what constitutes leisure? Might be worth looking out for obvious high street shops (Woolworths?) that are now charity shops and seeing what has been converted into Wetherspoons at the places I visit henceforth.
Prestatyn (on the way back) has a more impressive seafront, and a Pontins (closed, naturally), though there is still a lot of separation between town and beach. The Pontins was more accessible than the two Butlins I have passed in previous weeks and had a suitably forlorn, melancholic air common to most abandoned areas of merriment.
Week Twelve
Despite the idea of a ‘positive’ epilogue being (thankfully) short-lived, I still live the idea of an epilogue which could act as a counterpoint to the ideas presented in the rest of the project. Thus, the idea of ‘liminality of nationality’. One thing that many people have said to me is that nobody wants to holiday in Britain any more when they can go abroad for the same money. Hence this week’s memorable sojourn in Benidorm.
One thing was clear – the British (who have their own section of the town) still seem in favour of Brexit. Even those that live there. I managed to get a shot of a clearly British pensioner reading anti-Brexit ‘newspaper’ propaganda on the beach which sums up this particular exclave in so many ways.
Many of the British there, holiday-makers and expats alike, to whom I spoke didn’t really consider Benidorm to be part of Spain. They also felt that they would be OK as Benidorm relied so much on their money that the Spanish government would not let anything bad happen to them. They also also quite clearly believed that they were naturally superior to Europeans (despite being immersed in blindingly obvious evidence to the contrary). Having lived as an expat myself for most of the last decade, this attitude didn’t surprise me, though perhaps it was more passionately expressed than I may have expected. The difficulty here may be coming up with a story that isn’t too obvious. One or two people I spoke to did say they preferred Spanish food – that could be an approach, but I think this one will need quite a lot of mellowing time.
Photographically, there were a great many examples of the cuckoo-nature of the British there, along with the sorts of things that they only do on holiday (most obviously the rental of motorised wheelchairs. Not sure if this is because of the sitcom Benidorm or whether the sitcom was reflecting what was already here, but it is approaching an epidemic…)
And the one image to sum it up:
Week Thirteen
With some time away from seaside resorts and spent reading (see contextual research), I have identified six liminalities that I intend to use for the project, which I now envision as six zines, each with a story and photographs related to a liminality:
- Liminality of behaviour (sexuality and drinking, stag/hen parties)
- Liminality of age (teenagers growing up in seaside resorts – everything there is aimed at children or adults with little for those in between)
- Liminality of experience (the seaside as a bubble into which real life is not allowed to intrude)
- Liminality of age/era (the idea that seaside resorts are tied to the past, both in terms of nostalgia and of retirees choosing to move there)
- Liminality of purpose (people and place designed for busy times with nothing to do in the winter)
- Liminality of nationality (Brits in Benidorm)
Week Fourteen
First post-New Year trip for the project and a visit to Dorset, specifically Weymouth with a detour to Southsea on the way back.
Weymouth has the remains of its original pier used as a cafe/amusement arcade and what they have branded as the new pier which is, as far as I can make out, a car park by the harbour.
The Weymouth hotel was both grandly Victorian and empty which fuelled further ideas about the story of a hotelier in the winter months.
Additionally, I visited Sandbank, where the highly expensive properties along the highly exclusive beach had a new backdrop of an oil rig that had just arrived in the bay.
Further than that, Sandbank, Bournemouth (pier), Southsea and Ryde (where the pier is still used as originally intended – for ferries to dock) provided more shots of generally melanchic abandonment that may become useful once the stories are written but which do not spur any specific ideas in and of themselves.
Week Fifteen
A real juxtaposition this week when, as a week’s holiday in Venice had deposited me at Manchester airport, I decided on a quick trip to Blackpool for the night and to stay in the crumbling splendour of the Metropole Hotel by the North Pier.
Though it was a fleeting visit (the best kind) I tried to concentrate on the liminalities I have decided on.
Liminality of age (teens with nothing to do):
Liminality of purpose (places designed for holidays that are now empty):
Liminality of behaviour (a relaxing of sexual and social mores):
Liminality of experience (keeping the real world at bay):
The idea additionally was to try and find some stag/hen parties but the season isn’t quite underway yet and the only stag party I found were already drunk and somewhat raucous.
Week Sixteen
Having taken the decision that completing this course and my supposed ‘part-time’ teaching post are incompatible, I am now free to pursue the photography! Thus rather than just go down to Falmouth for the face-to-face weekend, I decided to go for the full 5 days and to get there by driving along the entire South Coast stopping on the way at several different resorts.
Margate was a rich source of photographic juxtapositions, being partly gentrified and partly down-at-heel. The Dreamland complex (using only vintage fairground rides) though closed for winter was still a clear nostalgic signpost, particularly in terms of its Art Deco architecture. Furthermore, Margate is a town that seems to rely on European labour for its service sector jobs so overall is surprisingly anti-Brexit, something confirmed by everybody I spoke to there as well as several prominently displayed signs.
Additionally, the remains of the Lido seem a good metaphor for the future of the seaside – nobody is sure what to do with them. They can’t be demolished because they are an important part of the town’s history, but there isn’t the money or the will to renovate so instead they slowly crumble.
Visits to Dover and Deal yielded a few more shots, particularly the utilitarian nature of Dover and the pier in Deal – the only one to be constructed since WW2 and a slice of brutal, concrete beauty (to my eyes at least) which goes hand in hand with the fishermen selling their catch directly from their boats a few hundred yards along the prom.
Eastbourne was useful in providing an image that juxtaposes the nostalgic view of the British seaside with its prosaic current reality – the graphic of a Britain that probably never existed covering a decrepit and empty shop.
Furthermore, and much to my surprise given its reputation as a geriatric bastion, Eastbourne had the largest and noisiest groups of bored teenagers I have come across so far.
Bognor and the parts of Dorset I had not covered previously again yielded sone shots that may work once the stories are complete but nothing that actually prompted particular ideas. The cheerful hoarding in Bognor that covered up a house being torn down seems another good metaphor.
As well as the 5 days in Falmouth I managed a trip to St. Ives which again has its own atmosphere (there were more people painting on the beach than there were walking dogs). It seems almost that Cornwall has managed, at least with the larger resorts, to have each one specialise in something. Almost certainly a class-based thing and another thing that could go into the mix.
Week Seventeen
South Wales provided a great deal of contrast, particularly between Barry and Porthcawl to the east and Tenby in the west, though Penarth, Laugharne and Port Talbot were also telling in their own way. One idea that occurred to me was to have a future project chronicling the British coast as I have quite a few shots that I really like that don’t quite fit with the current theme. Something to bear in mind.
Weeks Nineteen and Twenty
Having decided to visit the parts of the coast that I hadn’t been to, namely the North East and Cumbria, I also decided that I would connect the two by driving right the way round the Scottish coast too, which would mean that over the course of the project, I have (albeit piecemeal) driven a complete circuit of the coast of Great Britain. As this seems like a good idea for travel writing (following in the footsteps of Messers Raban and Theroux to name by two) accompanied by photographs, this meant that all those shots I was desperately holding onto but that didn’t quite fit suddenly had a new home and could leave my current project alone. This certainly made the advice received over the day of group crits in Falmouth (not to put too fine a point on it, I have no impulse control and my project currently looks like that friend who dumps all 357 photographs of their holiday straight from their phone onto Facebook) easier – it also made me realise the importance of being strict when editing a project – no matter how much I like a shot, if it doesn’t fit, it goes (or, as Faulkner put it “kill your darlings”).
The journey yielded some useful results. Before I left, I researched seaside resorts in Scotland and there didn’t seem many considering the length of coast. Of course once I got there, it was clear that north of about Aberdeen there is no sand. Some of the most incredible scenery, places and people. But no sand. Consequently, I got a lot of what I hope will prove useful shots for the round Britain road-trip project, but not a huge amount for this project. What I did get, was mostly from Cleethorpes up to Montrose (plus Lossiemouth) at the start of the trip and Largs down to Morecambe at the end.
The shot below, from Portobello cemented an idea that builds on what Gary was saying about there only being me in my photographs – one of the stories about the liminal outsiders who live in the off-season seaside should incorporate somebody who watches the people who go there – something I have felt very much on these travels, that as a photographer I am entirely an observer and not in any way a participant. Helped, I suppose, by the fact that I don’t much like beaches, I suppose.
Week Twenty One
With all the stories in place (at least thematically) I decided I needed more shots, particularly for the story provisionally entitled ‘The Watcher’ and the story about the closeted gay man on his stag night. which meant one final trip to Blackpool.
Although I did manage to photograph some stag and hen parties, the results I felt were too directly illustrative rather than what I wanted which was suggestively thematic.
On the way back from Blackpool I was also able to stop off at New Brighton meaning the first and last shots of both this project and the putative round-Britain road trip project would be from there – nicely symmetrical.
Which also gave this very nice first and last juxtaposition as we enter into the heady days of Spring:
Weeks Twenty Two onwards
With the photography complete, I now have to decide how to use the images.
I have pretty much decided on using a zine format, though practicalities (I am moving back to Dubai at the end of April) have dictated that I release all six stories in a single zine, with the possibility of further stories contributing to further issues (perhaps looking at international seasides, allowing me to use the Benidorm pictures there rather than in this collection). I additionally want the stories to be available in written form alone, written form with pictures, spoken form alone and spoken form with pictures. One of the key ideas I have been considering is how meaning is created by the reader/audience, a staple of my undergraduate studies in literature. This way I can encourage the audience to consume the stories in different ways and to reflect on what, if any, differences in meaning they perceive.
The final product will be a website containing visual presentations of the the photographs with the story being read over the field recordings, audio presentations of the podcasts of the stories, visual galleries of the photographs and a link to the purchase page for the zine (which will have to be fulfilled by Amazon if I am out of the country).
On Wendy’s advice, I decided to look at how other practitioners had designed the layout of image and text together, as I have neither the time nor the money to hire a designer. As the only bookshops near me sell little more than Harry Potter books and books about the good old days in Stoke-on-Trent, this necessitated a trip to London and the bookshops and the Photographers’ Gallery (which also meant I could take in the McCullin and Arbus exhibitions. And the fact that I would spend even less time in Stoke-on-Trent was purely coincidental).
I also got hold of as many zines currently on the market as I could in order to look for layout ideas.
In terms of combining text and images, there were several possibilities. The first was incorporating small images into blocks of text:
This seemed more appropriate to text-heavy publication. As the actual text of my stories runs to about 2 pages per story (each of which has 6-10 images) this may not work so well for me.
The next was to break a longer piece of text into sections almost as short as captions as Langston Hughes’ text was used with Roy DeCarava’s photographs in The Sweet Flypaper of Life which would work well in the opposite instance, with a small amount of text and a large number of images.
Another idea is to superimpose text and image which works incredibly well in Sophie Calle’s And So Forth where the form is an integral part of the meaning, but would not work with the quantity of text in my project. It may work with some of the text, but this could prove confusing, with the form distracting the reader from the content.
I also loved Calle’s use of postcards with short captions to introduce a completely different structure, though again this is an instance where the form is a larger part of the overall meaning.
Bruno Ceschel’s book Self Publish, Be Happy porved a valuable source when looking at overall design for photobooks. Two examples of how text and image might be combined from the book highlighted two different idea. First, where text and image might be approximately equal in weight:
And secondly, the idea of writing text and then photographing it, which brought in a whole new level of meta-cognition, but which, again, works better for less text-heavy projects.
The idea of balancing text and image on the same page was a prevalent one:
The three models I narrowed down to being suitable for what I was trying to achieve were, firstly, to have the text bound or included separately as an insert:
I really like this idea as it allows the text and image to be viewed simultaneously but allows the reader to make their own links between the two.
The next idea is the separation of text and image in the same book:
And the third is the breaking down of the text into smaller chunks and combining these with text on facing pages:
Initially I planned to go with the first idea, but consideration, along with discussion with Wendy and other friends (on and off the course) persuaded me that it might be preferable to have the stories and images bound together to reinforce the link between them. My first design went with the third idea above, feeling that it balanced the text and images in terms of quantity and visual appeal, and also allowed the reader to experience them with a close link made by me, as well as separately as they will also be presented on the website.
However, further reflection and discussion brought to light the fact that in some cases, the images now seemed to be directly illustrative, an idea I really wanted to avoid. So the final form upon which I settled was to break the zine down into chapters, each containing the text first followed by the images.
And finally, the finished product available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle format!
Notes
Ashcom, M. (2017). What The Living Carry. London: Mackbooks
Berger, J. and Mohr, J. (1997). A Fortunate Man. New York: Vintage
Berger, J. and Mohr, J. (2010). A Seventh Man. New York: Vintage
Calle, S. (2016). And So Forth. London: Prestel
Calle, S. (2015). My All. Arles: Actes Sud
Calle, S. (2017). True Stories. Arles: Actes Sud
DeCarava, R. and Hughes, L. (2018). The Sweet Flypaper of Life. New York: First Print Press
Henry, M. (2018). Night of the Hunted. Self-published
Jong, E. (2015). Getting to Know My Husband’s Cock. From Ceshchel, B., Self Publish, Be Happy. New York, Aperture
Marvin, J., Boling B., Miles, G. and Kim, D. (2018). Occasional Picture Stories. Nottingham: Outlaw Books
McCullin, D. (2019), Don McCullin. London: Tate
Meadows, D. (1975). Living Like This. London: Arrow
Meadows, D. (1988). Nattering in Paradise. London: Simon & Schuster
Morris, W. (1968). God’s Country and My People. 1st Ed. New York: Harper & Rowe
Murray, A., Parkinson, R. and Hawkesworth, J (2015). Preston Bus Station. From Ceshchel, B., Self Publish, Be Happy. New York, Aperture
Rada, T (2019). Domestic Borders. British Journal of Photography, (7880), pp.26-9
Riis, J. (1971). How The Other Half Lives. New York: Dover Publicaitons
Robins, C (2013). The Banality of the Ideal. Plymouth: Antler Press
Sebald, W. G. (2002). The Rings of Saturn. London: Vintage
Simon, D. (2019). Off Season. [self published]
Daniel Simon Photography 