Human geography draws a careful distinction between space, a location considered only as geography, a set of coordinates, and Place: a location as it is lived in, remembered, and made meaningful by the people who occupy it. Most photographs of the Isle of Wight treat it as the first. This project is concerned with the second.
The Isle of Wight performs itself as a timeless escape of sun, sea and sailing, a version of England often stuck in the 1950s. Unseen Island documents what that performance costs the Place underneath: the infrastructure quietly failing, the local economy hollowed out by seasonal work, the population unable to sustain the very image it is required to maintain for visitors who arrive for a weeks holiday in the summer and leave before everything shuts down.
These photographs do not resolve the tension between the Island as space and the Island as Place. They document it in the things left to crumble, the developments fought and built regardless, the ordinary life that continues, un-photographed, beneath the postcard.
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