Unseen bits of our harbour

A few weeks ago our group of local photographers decided that it was time to emerge cautiously with our cameras, and that we would start with a project that was very close to home.

Our harbour is the smallest of the 3 in the bay but it is a very busy one used mainly by crab fishermen. There is a processing plant and a sales space, and now, a crab café/bistro and soon a crab restaurant. The bistro is battling to make ends meet so it is reducing its opening hours while the restaurant looks to aim at the local chic clientele. It will be interesting to see how they coexist cheek-by-jowl. One is called ‘The Curious Crab’ (we don’t know how many lives a crab has – 9? like the curious cat?). The chic addition to the harbour is called ‘The Crab and Hammer’ – ouch! I will go back when the area is less busy to photograph them both as they were adamant that we could not photograph their spaces.

No project about the harbour can be complete without a recording of the smells from the crab nets – but I can’t do that at the moment, it will have to be imagined.

Of all the images I took, these best reflect what I feel about the place:

Buoys, processing plant, trawler and capstan.

Mussels, cratbclaw and net, international fishing.

New fishing boxes, rusty pipe, gig racer.

Picture frame, content, reflected harbour in the frame.

Some of the spaces had not survived the covid shutdown time; some had had their day because of Brexit supplying the fishing trade just before the pandemic .

We specified that the images we took in the 90 minutes we had decided to spend there were to be of things that visitors to the space would not choose to photograph but which were still representative of the space. The clouds held their rain until we had finished, and the outdoor pub space opened just as we had finished so we had our coffees and light bites and went home to watch the rain through our own windows.

At this point I look at the many screen grabs I have on my desktop and this quotation from New Materialisms exponent Jane Bennett made me reflect on what I had just done: