Over the past few months I’ve been out nearly every day taking pictures of anything that interested me. Mostly, I’ve found myself drawn to marginalia and odd details. I wanted to document the sorts of things one might easily overlook, but which had beauty, or strangeness, or ‘something’ even if I wasn’t sure quite what, to show how interesting the world can be if one only takes the time to look. However, in focusing on small things, there is a danger of missing the obvious.

A few days ago I was having a conversation with Jack and Mark, two of the guys at another café on the seafront. They asked me if I had any shots of the pier; they needed one for a billboard. I had to admit I didn’t, beyond close ups. So I decided to find a spot on the beach where I could get the whole thing in, side on, without any distortion. Of course this meant including a lot of beach packed with people, which creates the problem of framing the shot so there aren’t too many cut off heads sticking up into the bottom of the frame, which meant including quite a lot of the beach, and the sea, and a fair bit of the promenade too, by which point, I realized if I wanted to preserve any detail I’d have to take several photographs and stitch them together as a panorama.

It was only when I started piecing together about 30 photographs that I became engrossed in what I’d got. It seemed like all of life was going on before me – something brought out more by it being a still rather than a first-hand experience. Who are they? Where are they from? What kinds of lives do they lead? How many are falling in, or out of love?

I know none of these are particularly new observations, but that doesn’t diminish their power, so since that first one I’ve taken several more over 3 separate days. This one is of Brighton beach on a really hot day (taken for today’s entry of course). Even though it was shot around 5pm and it’s not yet quite high season, the place is literally jumping.

The version you see here is scaled down a lot so it doesn’t take forever to load onto your screens, but the original is about 2m long (at 240dpi) – a high definition representation of everyone visible at that moment in time. It feels like I’ve captured the whole world – in which case maybe it isn’t so different to the other photographs I’ve been taking, only this time it’s one panorama assembled out of fragments, rather than a contact sheet of different moments representing a journey.

And, of course, look at all those stones! I wonder which of them will end up being photographed in close-up some time in the future…

I think I might do some more over the coming weeks.