She would also have “days when I’d look for people”. Permission was always sought from adults to photograph children, and if using the plate camera, she could proffer black-and-white Polaroids to barter for their time. Being petite and female helped too. What she discovered, above all in the magnificent image which opens this essay, is that people behave like the weather: they scurry across a photographer’s sight lines like clouds scudding overhead, creating unpredictable shapes in relation to landscape and light, ever changing but also never changing, like the seaside itself.
Pictured: Weymouth, Dorset. "This girl stood there for ten minutes getting enough courage to go in further, but the water was so cold. The light on her was soft, but there was this impending storm coming so you had the darkness of the sky. I just thought that juxtaposition was beautiful. It was completely unstaged"
