Compton Beach is one of the Isle of Wight’s most photographed locations. Its west-facing bay draws photographers and tourists to the same moment: the sun dropping over the horizon, the cliffs at Freshwater Bay in deep shillouete, the sea either flat and cooperative, or with surfers populating an autumn swell. These photographs were made from a different position entirely.
Below the View is a site-specific series of close geological studies made at the base of Compton’s eroding cliffs. Formations and patterns of compressed clay, sandstone, and ironstone that are changing not over geological time, but over months.
Landslides occur seasonally. Sections disappear between visits. The beach that existed last year is different from the beach that exists today.
Most visitors do not notice. Attention, when it comes, arrives from above. From the cliff-top car park, from the coastal path running along the top of the cliffs, from the framing instinct that reaches automatically for the view. What lies below that instinct, the ochre and red sandstone, the cracks in dried clay, the layered record of conditions that predate the Island itself, goes largely unseen.
These photographs ask for a different quality of attention. Abstract at first glance, they document what the eye skips past en route to the sunset. The ever changing, unrepeatable surface of a coastline in constant flux.
None of these formations can be photographed again as they appear here. The cliffs have already moved on.
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