‘Whose story is it, anyway?’: perception, representation, and identity in textual and visual reportage of English seaside towns

ABSTRACT

In his study Storycraft, the veteran American journalist Jack Hart asks the following questions about reportage, memoir and other forms of nonfiction writing that proceed from the first-person perspective of their author: ‘Where’s the storyteller standing? What can he see and hear? Whose story is it, anyway?' (Hart, 2021, Storycraft: The complete guide to writing narrative nonfiction (p. 39). University of Chicago Press). The questions are suggestive of the formal and creative decisions reportage practitioners must make, but also of their ethical obligations to fairly represent their human subjects, especially if they are vulnerable, underprivileged and/or marginalized. The hinting at viewpoint – ‘whose story…’ – might also make us think about how identity is constructed from the stories we tell about ourselves and about our interactions with the world. This paper addresses all these issues primarily, though not exclusively, through the prism of Coast of Teeth, a practice-based visual and textual reportage project we completed in late 2022.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• illustration
• journalism
• cultural studies

In his study Storycraft, the veteran American journalist Jack Hart asks the following questions about reportage, memoir and other forms of nonfiction writing that proceed from the first-person perspective of their author: ‘Where's the storyteller standing? What can he see and hear? Whose story is it, anyway?' (Hart, 2021, p. 39) The questions are suggestive of the formal and creative decisions reportage practitioners must make, but also of their ethical obligations to fairly represent their human subjects, especially if they are vulnerable, underprivileged and/or marginalized. The hinting at viewpoint – ‘whose story…’ – might also make us think about how identity is constructed from the stories we tell about ourselves and about our interactions with the world. This paper addresses all these issues primarily, though not exclusively, through the prism of Coast of Teeth, a practice-based visual and textual reportage project we completed in late 2022.

From comments by Hart and other critics in the field, including Mary Karr, we can deduce that writing based on subjective lived experience should utilize a style and structure that reflects the way human beings perceive the world through their senses. When a human observer first notices a physical feature in time and space – whether a large natural or human-constructed place from a glacier to a shopping mall, or a relatively smaller object like another human being, a building or a piece of furniture – they might register one of its particular details. They may be struck by a dominant smell or noise emanating from that object or by a specific visual element such as a facial expression or a bold colour. By contrast, they might notice something quite the opposite to specificity, their senses triggering a broader and more general thought that could be a kind of summary of the constituent traits of the object encountered. Before considering some examples of writing that are analogous to these initial impressions, let us examine what happens next in this process of human perception.

If the observer spends longer looking at, listening to or absorbing in other ways through their other senses a particular feature of the world, its details will accumulate in their minds and their conception of the feature will become more comprehensive. However, of course, the human sensorium is not merely a device that is limited to apprehending data in ‘real time’, in the fashion of a video camera or sound recording device. As human beings, we also, of course, possess the faculties of memory, imagination and meaning-making. As Mary Karr acknowledges, memoir writers should emulate these more mental functions in their stories by employing writing techniques that transcend the enterprise of documenting what one has experienced in the phenomenal world. These techniques include ‘deriving meaning from … events’, ‘recounting old fantasies’ and ‘Moving back and forth through time when appropriate and giving info you didn’t have at the time, which breaks point of view’ (Karr, 2015, pp. 24–26). This latter method presumably mirrors the ways in which encounters with the physical topography of the world can trigger memories in the mind of the writer.

In a similar vein, when drawing, the artist must choose from a range of subjects within a fluid environment. The choice of subject is often informed by past experiences and the images that are then drawn that reflect a continuation of concerns which range from the aesthetic to the personal and political. Certain thematic interests can be mapped throughout an artist’s reportage work which pollute a purely observational, objective orientation to place. However, these concerns can also pinpoint and highlight lesser known or publicized issues such as homelessness, elder care, hooliganism, drug and alcohol abuse and degradation of the built environment. The history of twentieth century reportage drawing confirms this. Feliks Topolski, arguably the most active, visible and dynamic chronicler of the news of his day from 1930s to his death in 1989, noted that while drawing during the Blitz in London he was ‘hunting incidents’ and that they would ‘give most for the recording pencil’ (Topolski, 1988). Reportage artists have been drawn to crisis points and subjects that are emblematic of some subtle or overt social or political peril. For the reportage artist, the humble materials of pencil and paper are best mobilized to tell a human story, a story that can be effectively depicted in the gestural, notational marks of the drawing. As such, the way in which the artist’s shorthand depicts bodies, faces, and places, vivifies the artist's encounter with the subject. Like Topolski’s phrase of ‘hunting incidents’, the reportage artist is making quick selections from his or her environment that are functionally two-fold; firstly, they have an aesthetic appeal for the artist (they will ‘make’ a good drawing). Secondly, they contribute something to an understanding of the location. Unifying these two concerns is what makes a successful piece of reportage drawing. Inevitably, this results in a vision and depiction of place that is far from comprehensive. However, as an understanding of place anchored in the idiosyncratic experience of an individual, reportage drawing is a unique evocation and communion with granular perceptions, fleeting musings and deeply felt impressions; all constellations that reside in the marks of the drawing.

Art historian and theorist E.H. Gombrich noted of perception within the arts ‘it is always an active process, conditioned by our expectations and adapted to situations’. He furthers ‘instead of talking of seeing and knowing, we might do a little better to talk of seeing and noticing’ (Gombrich, 1972, p. 172). For Gombrich, the full participation in a work of art requires an alignment with the aims and ideals of the artist. In reportage drawing, it is necessary to understand the formal application of the artist’s visual language to fully understand how, where and why their attention accumulates in lines and marks. More than mere perception, looking at drawing is re-creative; we re-enact the drawing in our minds as we move towards understanding. As such, drawing enables not just eyesight into insight (Kris, 1964), it reveals the machinations of the mind and hand as it produced the image. Psychoanalyst Ernst Kris noted ‘perceiving achieves, at the sensory level, what in the realm of reasoning is known as understanding’ (p. 37). Kris makes this point in a variety of cogent ways, identifying the ‘intelligence’ of seeing and how in art making, there is a tendency to speak of the ‘intellect’ and ‘concepts’ instead of a visual/perceptual understanding of the processes within art. He notes ‘all the cognitive instruments of the mind operate by grasping over-all features of a phenomena or a group of phenomena through form patterns of a medium … The word ‘concept’ refers to an operation that may occur in any kind of cognition, it does not reduce all cognition to intellectual processes’ (p. 164). The condensation of concerns that cohere in the reportage drawing reflect this. It is one of the reasons that the act has sustaining interest to practitioners. The resulting drawing always contains a range of perceptions that even the artist was not aware of on a conscious level. It is, therefore, aligned with Kris’s contentions, a formulation outside intention, intellect or a kind of prefiguring. The ‘work’ of the drawing, i.e. rendering the visible into formal referents, is a process of submitting to active vision. This often results in drawings which surprise the artist in their level of detail or emphasis, highlighting features which reveal subconscious interests.

In Figure 1, Louis witnessed the subject as he walked through one of Prague’s many narrow cobbled streets on the way to Wenceslas Square. It was cold and he had to meet students so he did not draw from direct observation. Instead, I found a perch on a monument in the square and quickly drew. I was happy with the drawing but acknowledged a few inaccuracies about the placement of the beggar in relation to the dogs which in reality was much closer. I happened to walk back the same street on the way to another location soon after. I was surprised to see the beggar again although stood up and talking and I was equally surprised that my depiction of him was remarkably accurate. A memory drawing such as this is akin to a re-perception of the scene and it holds a kind of intimate power. It is a construction of memory and attests to the residual power of perception. I try to directly record when I can but when not possible, these memory drawings are a surprisingly effective evocation of what was seen and felt. Ethnographer and drawer, Andrew Causey identifies this particular strength of drawing compared with photography. He notes, speaking of his previous use of photography in the field, ‘photographic images – which seemed to hold so much promise – may have actually permitted me not to see’. He furthers ‘the drawn image can be added to and subtracted from, it can be made over a period of time, it can slip in details not currently in the “frame,” it can stretch and compress real views, it can depict such ephemeral things as dreams and feelings … ’ (Causey, 2017, pp. 35–36). Although much of this would indicate a high degree of subjectivity in the drawn image, reportage drawings are valued by the artist for their anchorage to the seen, felt, and experienced. They are only effective if they contain multiple layers of the encounter with the subject. Deviation from this encounter into stylism, fabrication and embellishment is considered undesirable, and these contrivances on the part of the artist defeats the aims of in-situ drawing.

Figure 1. ‘Beggar in Prague, 2023’. Louis Netter.

Reportage artists utilize caricatural methods in their work but not as a means of extending from the observed subject but rendering that subject more emphatic. The root of the word caricature is ‘to charge’ and this is a fitting way of seeing the function of these embellishments (Petherbridge, 2010). The ethics of reportage drawing is an under researched and under explored topic among practitioners. An assumption is made that practitioners value the act because it results in a record of engagement in a live environment. Descending into fabrication is not just breaking a tacit code, it defeats the entire purpose and core sustaining interest in the act i.e. the struggle to render an experience within the limitations of the hand, eye, and mind. The result is a kind of authentic vision which will bear the idiosyncrasies of the individual artist's facility, orientation to the subject, and world view. There is little value ascribed to fabrication and the artist might as well create the work in a comfortable studio and not in the arena of fluid reality. Aligned with journalistic writing, reportage drawing centres around a heightened state of observing and looking. It is not a casual gaze, it is purposeful and keenly present to subjects, and subject types which encapsulate the scene and setting. As writer Iain Sinclair noted about the contemporary move from the flaneur, ‘we had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent … This was walking with a thesis’ (Coverly, 2010, p. 120).

One of the challenges to any writer of memoir and autobiography is developing a textual structure which permits the smooth transition between descriptions of people, places, and items encountered in the world and the insights and images generated by memory, imagination, and pre-existing knowledge about the wider world that has not been gained through first-hand experience (this could include secondary research or insights gleaned ‘second-hand’ from books, articles, social media, rumours, and so forth). With respect to transitioning from lived experience to this latter type of data within an experiential narrative, the critic Kari Gísláson advises that travel writers – and, so we can extrapolate from this, other kinds of writers concerned with place, such as journalists – should ‘tie exposition to a specific point in the journey’ (Gísláson, 2012, p. 90). In other words, after describing a particular location visited and witnessed – whether a city, town, church, desert, or volcano – the writer can then provide contextual information about the site’s history or cultural significance that could only have been obtained through prior secondary enquiry.

With these imperatives in mind, we want to propose a tripartite structure informed by canonized practitioners of reportage and, more specifically speaking, travel writing. To illustrate how the formula works, let us begin with a quotation from Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987):

Meanwhile, across town, seven women poets were reciting in the ruins of the Grand Hotel. Most of the hotel had collapsed in the earthquake. What remained – a central courtyard overlooked by balconies and open, now, to the sky – served the city as a cultural centre. The ruins were crowded with poetry-lovers. I did not think I had ever seen a people, even in India and Pakistan where poets were revered, who valued poetry as much as the Nicaraguans. (Rushdie, 1987, p. 40)

The formula begins with Rushdie witnessing the arresting image of the Nicaraguan women poets reciting verse in the wreckage of a hotel. He then moves on to associating what he has seen with a personal memory (the public adoration of poets in Rushdie’s native Indian subcontinent), which then leads on to a wider political point Rushdie wishes to make (that art and literature are highly respected in the new revolutionary society of Nicaragua).

This example from Colin Thubron’s Amongst the Russians (1983) is pithier: ‘So we started to drink. Vodka – the colourless innocence! It’s the curse and liberation of Russia, a self-obliterating escape from tedium and emptiness, from interminable winter nights, and the still longer, darker nights of the soul’ (Thubron, 1983, p. 68). Thubron’s brief sketch of his drinking bout with an engineer in Novgorod during his epic journey around the USSR expands into a general cultural comment about the ambiguous presence of vodka in Soviet life. Thubron’s reflections here remind us of Gísláson’s notion that ‘events in a travel story don’t occur in isolation of their social context’ (p. 90).

In reportage drawing, this two-fold aspect is critical. We have subject, context and the drawing itself to fill the micro narrative of the drawing. The drawing speaks to a specific moment of observation and layered circumstantial elements like the weather, drawing position, and the audio landscape. The resulting drawing, however, does not close this experience, it invites the participation of the viewer and as such, it is a symbolic document. Drawn people and places become iconic symbols of space and place and our understanding of them is as a depicted, observed person or thing and a punctuated, universal emblem of pain, joy, sorrow, moral bankruptcy, poverty, addiction, etc. The poetics and power of reportage drawing reside in the currency of drawn marks and how they attest to the active looking and feeling of the artist. The ethical dimension within reportage drawing as it is practised is less about representation and more about choice of subject. The artist's choices reveal, as much as they do about the nature of a locale, the attentions, passions, and principles of the artist. The image below highlights this two-fold encounter with people, places, and themes that emerge within them.

‘Blackpool, 2022’. Louis Netter.

The image above highlights the double reading that occurs in the drawing. We immediately can see a sharp contrast between the smiling stuffed animals and the deflated pier worker. We can then start to see more elements of the drawing that can be classified as metaphoric and exploring themes about life for this worker and the doldrums of working at amusement in the off season. Louis can specifically highlight the bunny that looks like it is being hung in the upper right corner and the words ‘get in the bucket’ can be seen as possibly relating to kicking the bucket (as in dying). There is an absurdity in this observed scene and unlike the photograph, we connect to this man and his occupation in a more universal way, connecting in our minds to all of the other seaside amusements we have encountered and adding this image to those image categories within our minds. Because of the explicit facture of the reportage drawing, we also understand this as an image made and therefore our insight/eyesight aligns with the artists. Something the mechanical magic of the photograph shrouds. Art historian Herbert Read noted ‘when we contemplate a work of art, we project ourselves into the form of the work of art, and our feelings are determined by what we find there, by the dimensions we occupy’ (Read, 1967, p. 30).

The reportage practitioner’s wider cultural, social, and political considerations necessarily include two other crucial forms of awareness. Firstly, the writer or artist’s recognition of their own positionality and relationship to the milieux they are representing and, secondly, their acknowledgement of the dominant media discourses that persistently misrepresent communities that are marginalized and oppressed on the basis of class, gender, ethnicity and other identity markers.

We now want to explore our own engagements with these forms of awareness with reference to Coast of Teeth, a practice-based autoethnographic research project that the two of us have collaborated on. Between 2020 and 2022, we visited and reported on twenty-one communities based in English seaside towns that have been suffering socially, economically, and ecologically. Given that our previous research has interrogated various discourses of relatively privileged writers and artists all over the world patronizing, belittling, and misunderstanding (Jones, 2021; Netter, 2020; Sykes, 2021) those less fortunate than themselves, we were adamant that our own representations of coastal communities were as fair, accurate and empathetic as possible. ‘Poverty porn’ (Phoca, 2002, p. 217) is a representational model that is ubiquitous in tabloid newspaper coverage of deprived communities, typified by a 2019 Daily Star article by Anna Savva about Jaywick in southeast Essex. In a probably unconscious rehabilitation of the Victorian binary between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’ (Thane, 1978, p. 29), Savva dubs the residents ‘benefits cheats’ (2019). The lack of any ironizing or in other ways qualifying scare quotes around ‘benefits cheats’ suggests that, according to this writer and their ideological perspective, the term has become normative and commonsensical. It is arguably an example of what linguist Norman Fairclough calls ‘expressive modality’, in which vocabulary and grammatical constructions disclose a ‘speaker or writer’s authority with respect to the truth or probability of a representation of reality’ (Fairclough, 2013, p. 64). One resident’s ‘peace offering of a fat spliff’ to Savva as she arrives in Jaywick seems to imply that the community’s ‘backwater’ (2019) poverty is primarily due to its own irresponsibility and idleness rather than objective economic and political determinants. Yet the people of Jaywick are in another sense members of the ‘deserving poor’ because, rather than holding power to account for their conditions, they remain patriotic and therefore accepting of their place in the class hierarchy of the nation state. ‘While they admit it's a litter-strewn “ghetto” and “pisshole”,’ Savva observes, ‘it's also ‘the best place in the world’ where everybody knows each other and where one resident flies a tattered Union Jack with pride’ (2019).

Arguably, the Star article’s principal flaw is its dearth of what journalism scholar Mark Pedelty calls ‘sense making’: the inclusion of detailed social, political, economic, and historical context in a work of reportage (Hamilton, 2012). As the literary critic Terry Eagleton avers sardonically, writers who represent the problems of the world will be hamstrung if they proceed by the dictum ‘You must stick as closely as you can to the facts and avoid fancy theories’, for simply ‘seeing a man pilfering food will tell you nothing about the causes of poverty’ (Eagleton, 2003). In practice, there are numerous barriers to reporters attaining such theoretical knowledge beyond their experience ‘in the field’. Perhaps the most significant one is ideology. It is, for instance, unlikely that a journalist employed by an outlet like the Daily Star – whose editorial line (in turn partly determined by the political attitudes of its proprietor) is nakedly reactionary in its negative depiction of immigrants, the unemployed, ethnic minorities and so forth – could deviate much from that worldview in their reporting without wrecking their chances of career progression. As the great American ‘muckraker’ Upton Sinclair remarked sardonically, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it’ (Cited in Klinkauer, 2023). And even if a journalist is not professionally ambitious, they will be vulnerable to what Mark Pedelty has defined as ‘A confluence of organizational structures [that] effect constant micro-corrections, keeping reporters within established parameters of political discourse without the need of overt censorship or retribution’ (Pedelty, 1998, p. 95). Another factor mitigating against sense making includes higher education journalism courses, which generally do not include any training in history, economics, the social sciences or other disciplines that would assist with a broader understanding of social reality (Hamilton, 2012).

The absence of sense making in reportage results in, as is dazzlingly evident from the Star story above, a fetishistic, spectacular and/or voyeuristic construction of social problems. If a reporter provides little to no explanation of the macro social causes of poverty, crime, and alienation, then there is a danger that the reader will arrive at fallacious political conclusions such as that social problems are solely the fault and responsibility of their victims. The literary critic Mary-Louise Pratt has identified a trope she calls ‘Third World blues’ in travelogues by Paul Theroux and Alberto Moravia. These Global Northern writers describe the ‘grotesque, joyless cityscapes’ of the Global South in flamboyantly miserablist language without any attempt to explain how and why these spaces are so blighted by crime, poverty, vice, and so on. Worse still, Pratt avers, there is a certain hypocrisy about their approach because they omit from their constructions the ‘history tying the North American Theroux to Spanish America or the Italian Moravia to Africa, despite the fact that much of what they are lamenting is the depredations of western-induced dependency’ (Pratt, 1991, p. 217).

Facile and ideologically suspect constructions of Britain’s ‘left-behinds’ are not exclusive to the right-wing media, though. The cultural theorist Joe Kennedy has upbraided liberal reporters such as John Harris of the Guardian for flattening a disparate array of working-class towns – some of them based beside the seaside – into a single, narrow imagined geography populated almost entirely by patriotic, regionalistic, racist, xenophobic, metropolitan elite-hating poor people who have been failed by deindustrialization and globalization (Kennedy, 2018). For Kennedy, this vision of a broken Britain has little to do with empirical reality and is largely a projection of centrist assumptions. ‘The embrace of “legitimate concerns” nativist stuff by people who’d been very heavily invested in the New Labour project comes down to its usefulness as an alibi for that genuinely horrific economic neglect of significant parts of the country’ (Kennedy cited in Cruell, 2018). To return to Jack Hart’s provocative question ‘whose story is it, anyway?’ (2021), in the discourses of both conservative and liberal reportage on seaside towns, the answer appears to be that the story is the conservative or liberal reporter’s more than it is their subjects’.

In our research for the Coast of Teeth project, we visited Jaywick but tried assiduously to avoid reproducing the representational errors of the Star piece, the neocolonialist travel writers Pratt has interrogated nor domestic journalists like Harris. As reportage practitioners we had a ‘professional responsibility to report’ (Cottle, 2016) on the same spatial and physical markers of deprivation as the Star article: ‘the abodes … spruced up with salvaged – or stolen? – items’ (Sykes & Netter, 2023, p. 58) and the ‘amnesty bin into which knives can be dropped without legal comeback’ (p. 63). However, what allows us to avoid the dematerialized ridiculing or fetishizing of this community is a transition – that occurs at the end of our chapter on Jaywick – from our lived experience to socio-political sense making based on secondary research conducted above and beyond our fieldwork. We conclude that the people of Jaywick have been failed by the powerful and that they are in a ‘mess not of their own making’ (p. 67). We reveal that the local MP, Giles Watling, is an enthusiastic advocate of the Universal Credit system that independent experts argue hinders rather than helps the neediest in British society. Moreover, we aver

As a devout Brexiteer, he [Watling] has no qualms about losing European Regional Development Fund cash worth £1.5 billion a year that has renewed ailing regions just like his own. Nor does he appear to share concerns about [local] flooding … having often voted in parliament against measures to stop climate breakdown. (p. 67)

‘Scarborough, 2022’. Louis Netter.

The drawing above was drawn from the steps of a post office on the Scarborough high street. When selecting subjects, a quick appraisal of the entire place is happening concurrently. You look, see, feel and select. The drawing materializes quickly and the notational marks, which are wholly responsive to what is seen, indicate more than could be consciously pre-figured. Many elements in this drawing tell us about the locale and the people who live there. The drawing was done in the middle of the day in the middle of the week and the high street was crowded with people. It was clear from the first entrance onto the high street that this was an economically depressed area. Store closures, desperate looking people and visible signs of alcohol and drug issues amongst residents. In drawing people in places, it is often easy to see comparisons between human subjects and their built environment and a topography of faces, bodies, and street furniture, merge to tell the same story. Although poverty is technically understood as an absence, in the people Louis has observed and drawn, it is additive and layers of sad consequence create totemic figures of society’s cast offs. In the drawing above, the mobility scooter, the obesity, the forlorn lowered head, the smoking, and the skinny older man, reflect a summation of poverty and impoverishment. An article in the regional newspaper Yorkshire Live cited a report was cited that saw higher levels of deprivation and lower life expectancy among Scarborough residents and that these areas ‘fall within the most deprived national quintile of the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2019’ (Belcher, 2022). Drawings like the above contribute to a vision of the city which reveals an unflinching truth through an observed scene which in itself, is an encapsulation of social ills experienced by many of its residents. The re-creative act of looking at the drawing enables us to not just connect to the vision of the artist but to reflect on his/her choices, rendering meaning from the artist's aesthetic choices.

Elsewhere in our research for Coast of Teeth, we sedulously contextualized the impressions we gained ‘on the ground’ of other social predicaments with secondary data and those ‘fancy theories’, as Eagleton (2003) puts it. These were some of our findings. Since the 1970s there has been a steady decline in domestic coastal tourism (Light & Chapman, 2022, p. 42) and, more recently, austerity policies have produced low life expectancy, higher concentrations of chronic disease, higher suicide rates, and large-scale unemployment in coastal communities (Select Committee on Regenerating Seaside Towns and Communities, 2019). Disgruntlement about such problems may have helped to fuel Brexit. Analysis of the EU referendum by political scientist Chris Hanretty shows that around 100 of the 120 or so littoral constituencies voted to leave (Hanretty, 2017). While a poll carried out just ahead of the vote by researchers at the University of Aberdeen suggested that 92% of the fishing industry would be voting to leave the EU (Milne, 2016). And for all the increases in visitors once COVID-19 lockdown restrictions were lifted, many seaside towns suffered surging unemployment rates during the pandemic (Resolution Foundation, 2020). The coast must also contend with the grim consequences of the climate breakdown. With rising sea levels comes the increased risk of flooding and in some instances cliff erosion has led to entire buildings falling into the sea (Edwards, 2017). Such macro detail is conspicuously absent from the conventional journalistic coverage of seaside towns critiqued above.

In addition to their unwillingness to understand these abject territories in politically holistic terms, Savva, Theroux, Moravia, and others never acknowledge their own positionality as relatively privileged visitors to underprivileged spaces – wherever in the world – nor ever entertain the possibility that their conclusions may be partisan or partial. By contrast, the critics Rune Graulund and Justin Edwards provide some useful imperatives for a more ethically responsible approach to travel writing and, we can reasonably deduce, more generally writing about place. The ‘narrating subject’ should, they argue, be aware of the fact it is ‘determined by identificatory markers (nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, class, economic status, religion etc.)’ (Edwards & Graulund, 2012, p. 10). Indeed, a more ‘progressive politics’ of representation is possible when writers are ‘self-reflexive about the genre (and his or her participation in it)’ (p. 4). A key dimension of this self-reflexivity is that the writer ‘does not position himself or herself as the primary source of authority’ (p. 10). In Coast of Teeth, we endeavoured to absorb Edwards and Graulund’s advice in order to, we hope, depict seaside towns in a more compassionate, nuanced, and sensitive fashion.

The form and function of illustrations in Coast of Teeth acts as not only an adjunct to the text as it is so often in published work, but provides a parallel dialogue that allows for engagement with Edwards and Graulund’s imperatives. Because the methodology for the writing and the drawing shares features of the psychogeographical dérive, the drawings document the journey of both artist and writer and reflect encounters that not only contextualize and fix the writing, they originate, invent and render another narrative that is driven solely by the human beings and built architecture encountered. Functionally, images evade concrete and fixed interpretation and this enables a rewarding subjective experience on the part of the viewer. Academic W. J. T. Mitchell sees images as not just polysemous, but as composed of so many factors and functions that they acquire a kind of sentient desire, a will to affirm a cause. He notes

it is also why the notion of a ‘life of images’ is so inevitable. Images need a place to live, and that is what a medium provides … Asking for the address of a medium is like asking for the address of the postal system. (Mitchell, 2005, p. 216)

Mitchell challenges many semioticians and sees images as having a desire, function, and composition which is often misappropriated and banalized in contemporary culture. For the purposes of this paper, it is important to see the image as functionally different from the written word but equally, it is critical to see its meaning as inevitably unstable and dependent on the distinct experiences and understandings of the viewer. This instability poses opportunities for discussion but it is also provocative. It confirms that drawings can’t be required to furnish the evidence seen in the photograph and that the drawing itself is an artefact of experience, not of objective reality.

Andrew Causey speaks of reportage drawing as ‘a fascinating risk’ and notes, ‘your act (drawing) is a direct statement to yourself and others that “this is how I see it”. There is no backing down, and no apologies are needed or expected, no matter what others may tell you’. He qualifies, ‘as long as you can stand behind what you create (ethically, morally, intellectually), your work is as much an unassailable statement as any other document you can make’ (Causey, 2017, pp. 49–50). This is the crux of the issue with reportage drawing; its ethical framework is entirely self-regulated and it presents itself to the viewer to accept or reject its vision, to be judge, jury, and critic. To further complicate the matter, the artwork, as problematic and unstable as it may be, aligns more closely with a desire for clarity than confusion. The art is of this world and for this world. Therefore, when some worry that the reportage drawing is a dangerous fabrication, a false mimetic statement, it is, more accurately, the result of an active and productive struggle for truth and representation. Theorist Rudolf Arnheim noted:

Imaginative form does not spring from the desire to offer ‘something new’ but from the need to revive the old. It springs from the original view that an individual or culture will take spontaneously of the inner and outer world. Rather than distorting reality, imaginative form reaffirms the truth. It is the unsought result of the attempt to reproduce an experience as accurately as possible. (Arnheim, 1954, p. 141)

The goal of the reportage artist is to align his/her vision with the drawing act and success is measured by how comprehensively the drawing reflects the vision. Therefore the self-regulation mentioned above is the primary arbiter of value in the image, maintaining a closeness to original vision and experience. Self-titled ‘graphic reportager’ Victoria Lomasko notes ‘I felt the need to complete my drawings on the spot, to serve as a conductor for the energy generated by events as they happened. I refuse to make drawings from photos and videos’ (Lomasko & Campbell, 2017, p.8). The drawn document, as imperfect as it is, is the conduit for the experience of the artist and to fully engage with that vision, it needs to reflect the live struggle for representation. Reportage drawing is experience writ large.

When we head to our first northern seaside town, Robin Hood’s Bay, Tom ruminates on his ambiguous status as a ‘northerner. Sort of’ (p. 96). Despite being told from an early age about his rich Yorkshire heritage – achieved partly through his great-grandfather, after whom he was named, being a ‘hero in his hometown of Goole’ – Tom doubts whether such an ‘identificatory marker’ as Graulund and Edwards would dub it, would automatically engender any kind of respect as an ‘insider’ to that community. ‘There’s a higher probability that some southern ponce spouting off about his authentic local ties would earn himself a well-deserved punch on the nose’ (p. 96). Tom is then candid about his ignorance of the north, having travelled there infrequently. When he encounters the visible ‘wealth and patriotism’ (p. 101) of Robin Hood’s Bay, he confesses to having been partly indoctrinated by one of the generalizing boilerplates that Joe Kennedy warns about – that the north is the politically binary opposite of the south. At the end of the visit, what he has encountered doesn’t ‘square with my idea of the north – or at least how I’d like the north to be’. However, rather than resulting in the hardening of his original attitude as per the non-progressive writers Graulund and Edwards cite, he admits his own fallibility as someone who is not ‘the primary source of authority’ (p. 10): ‘But then why should anyone care what I want, the quasi-semi-hazy-northerner I am?’ (p. 101)

For the self-reflexive purposes Graulund and Edwards outline, Coast of Teeth also deconstructs stereotypical constructions of certain communities that might have been imbibed by the sorts of well-meaning though ultimately dogmatic liberal reporters that Kennedy upbraids. Such constructions include the ‘Essex man’ myth that has been superimposed on towns like Clacton-on-Sea. After outlining this ‘crude narrative’ we conclude that it ‘must have been dreamed up by middle-class snobs’ (p. 42). After witnessing a group of elderly and infirm people dancing to a Wurlitzer organist in Blackpool, we observe

It would be easy for a pair of southern, professional-managerial-class wankers like us to mock or dismiss this event as what northern, working-class provincials like to do for fun in the absence of anything better. This is often the angle taken by metro media types who condescend to hazard this far up from the Watford Gap. (p. 124)

While we make it clear that we do not share this perception – ‘But that isn’t our view.’ – we nonetheless self-deprecatingly do not exclude ourselves from belonging, at least superficially by dint of our backgrounds and jobs, to the ‘professional-managerial-class’ (p. 124). It is just that, so we try to argue, not everyone who belongs to a particular social group must necessarily adhere to that group’s official ideology. This allows us, then, to contest the dominant assumptions of the reportage genre we are working in, in the fashion that Graulund and Edwards contend.

‘Bournemouth, 2021’. Louis Netter.

The drawing above was one of the first done on our visit to Bournemouth on the hottest day of the year in July 2021. There were throngs of beach goers pouring down a small path towards the beach. It was a joyous procession of half-naked people delirious in the hot midday sun. Louis spotted an older couple who seemed overwhelmed by the procession and the shattering of the peace in their lush, green and usually quiet park. Bournemouth’s demographics are that of a seaside town that has few of the social ills plaguing other destinations: good health outcomes, a high rate of home ownership, healthy business profile, and a significant percentage of residents (40%) in a high skill profession (Area profile for Bournemouth, 2023). With that in mind, we can see that there is conflict depicted in the drawing between locals, some who may be retired, and visitors who are down from London and other destinations for the day. On the beach that day, an ethnically diverse range of people mingled in the sun. This would indicate that when the sun is out, Bournemouth becomes a different place socially. Drawings like the above hint at these frictions and even speak to a conflict and ambiguity that would seem to contest easy stereotypes and generalizations. Their wanton tackiness is an affront to at least a proportion of the British character’s more reserved, retiring demeanour. Through the specificity of character depicted, we can involve ourselves in the drama of the image and align our psychic world with those depicted. Our understanding of the image is based on some level of familiarity with the depicted. Gombrich, making reference to the small population of people who can photographically remember things they have seen, notes that the process of making a picture that captures that reality is something entirely different. He argues

that power of holding on to an image that Ruskin describes so admirably is not the power of the eidetic (one possessing a photographic memory); it is that faculty of keeping a large number of relationships present in one’s mind that distinguishes all mental achievement, be it that of the chess player, the composer, or the great artist. (Gombrich, 1972, p. 310)

The relationships that Gombrich speaks of can be understood as drawn referents to observed reality and the ability to re-construct that reality, understanding the currency and consequence of composing those elements together.

One of the most toxic of the ‘left behind’ reportage genre’s assumptions, argues Joe Kennedy, is that the benighted working classes in locations like those we visited for Coast of Teeth believe that ‘poetry, books, music, painting and so are only for the well-off’. This seemingly anti-elitist attitude, Kennedy adds instructively, is ‘in its own right … a highly elitist gesture, a way of asserting proprietorship over culture’ (2018). While we are used to seeing this kind of prejudice in the conservative tabloid press, Kennedy avers that, nowadays, it is in fact an instantiation of a much more profound and larger-scale ideological phenomenon that Kennedy associates with the centre of modern British politics. What he calls ‘authentocrats’, journalists, academics, and politicians, who often were disciples of Tony Blair’s Third Way in the nineties and noughties, ‘have chosen overwhelmingly to represent … the concerns of working-class people … as cultural concerns coalescing around immigration, patriotism and defence, rather than material ones about jobs, wage stagnation and the housing crisis’ (2018). Indeed, the authentocratic fallacy about the innate philistinism of ‘the proles’ has been mobilized against those forces further to the left of liberal elites that propose material rather than cultural solutions to the crises engulfing working-class communities, coastal ones included. Kennedy cites the social media outcries instigated by centrist politicians and pundits about the left-wing erstwhile Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s public invocations of high cultural figures such as James Joyce and Percy Bysshe Shelley. This was ‘hardly an example of the common touch’ and proved, in these critics’ eyes, that Corbyn’s politics were irrelevantly and aloofly metropolitan, elitist even (2018). That Corbyn read out excerpts from Shelley’s poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ to cheering crowds of thousands, many of whom were working-class according to any reasonable definition of the term, is an awkward fact that these grousing authentocrats overlooked.

If culture is a significant component of identity – even if it is not as decisive as the authentocrats would have us believe – the ‘philistine prole’ slur suggests that ‘the best kind of culture’ (art, literature, good food etc.) is simply not part of the identity of working-class people. Our fieldwork for Coast of Teeth revealed that the Manichean thinking behind this assertion is highly suspect. With cultural theorist Raymond Williams’ famous dictum that ‘culture is ordinary’ (2013, p. 1) in mind, we found that the coastal communities we visited had used culture – though not defined in a narrow, bourgeois authentocratic sense – as a resource with which to build solidarity and identity as a defensive barrier against austerity, climate change and the other socio-economic slings and arrows hurled at them by those same elites who would pass snobbish judgement on their forms of culture. We saw much evidence of collaboration at the grassroots level to creatively respond to these crises, even if such work is unlikely to win the attention of the metropolitan art world. In Jaywick Sands Martello Tower, ‘photographers, painters, musicians, historians and schoolchildren’ had come together in what a university might call ‘multidisciplinary’ fashion to reflect on the peril of rising sea levels and ‘curate an exhibition of beachcombed items from flippers to crabbing nets’ (p. 63). In Blackpool we visited the Old Electric community art space where independent, cooperatively-run, not-for-profit theatre, dance and creative writing projects offer an alternative to the city’s reified entertainment options: pubs, nightclubs, restaurants, and performance venues managed top-down and/or owned by corporations (p. 125). The activities of the Martello Tower and the Old Electric surely relate to that Williamsonian notion of culture as a spontaneous and dynamic process of people doing constructive things for themselves in unison, and feeling more connected and comradely towards one another as a result. As Williams himself writes, ‘The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land’ (p. 2).

‘Blackpool, 2022’. Louis Netter.

The drawing above was done inside Pat’s Bingo Hall in Blackpool, which in many ways conforms to Williams’ notion of popular culture. It is a small, narrow, and very yellow storefront which has a regular crowd of around 10–15 bingo players. The fast-paced game utilizes an old slide door bingo machine that is coin operated. The man depicted above is Pat himself and he probably spends most days in that raised seat above the players below delivering his unique brand of bingo answers. This image speaks to Blackpool through the representation of an iconic character. A character that even before immortalization in drawing, was a living icon. He represents an old-fashioned Blackpool that is still entertaining visitors and those passers-by tempted by the rare charms of Pat himself. Capturing a character like Pat requires a heightened level of observation and visual ‘fact-checking’ because the character is not an interchangeable type as is with most drawn subjects, he is a known entity. Drawing theorist Philip Rawson notes:

We recognise that the poet or even the musician must find some sort of ‘external’ equivalents for their internal experiences. So too must the draughtsman; but the strength of his position, or the difficulty he must face, according to one’s viewpoint, is that the draughtsman’s external equivalents acquire an objectivity from the drawing surface and substance even whilst he is shaping them … And this objectivity, in the case of representational drawings, will always compare itself with the objectivity of the overt subject-matter in the eyes of the draughtsman and patron. (Rawson, 1969, p. 315)

The artist is balancing the challenge of rendering forms through lines and marks and presenting a convincing reality, a reality which is sufficiently populated with the known furniture and actors of the world that it manages to be a believable representation of it. As Coast of Teeth was aiming to facilitate greater understanding of the English seaside, these drawings endeavour to not only truthfully reflect the reality on the ground, but offer a new, drawn vernacular from which to see it, understand it, and feel it in a new way.

The impulses towards sociality that we see in Pat’s Bingo Hall have become more urgent in an era when neoliberal capitalism has ‘increased loneliness and decreased well-being by reducing people’s sense of connection to others and by increasing perceptions of being in competition with others’ (Becker et al., 2021). Another deleterious consequence of the neoliberal settlement has been the state’s shrinking capacity to support its needier citizens. The Old Electric’s work with refugees and people with disabilities could be considered a grassroots mitigation of this shortcoming. Similarly, having chided the clique of southern metropolitan journalists – to which we tangentially belong – and their tendency to fetishize the ironic retromania of Blackpudlians waltzing to Wurlitzer organ renditions of ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’, we conclude that the Blackpool Tower Ballroom demonstrates an admirable duty of care to ‘its vulnerable members, with the elderly, lonely and possibly dementia-troubled clearly stimulated by the music and the moving about’. Moreover, ‘Around the bar area of the Ballroom are plugs for coffee mornings, book groups, country walks and other public-spirited activities’ (p. 124). None of these claims should in any way exonerate the state’s retreat from its obligations, but they do nonetheless indicate some hope about the agency of ordinary people to resist the pressure from above to become atomized and blame other members of their own class such as immigrants or the unemployed for their material woes, as per the stereotypes peddled by authentocratic media coverage, whether conservative or liberal in inflection.

Arguably, the spontaneous and localized processes by which working-class people in seaside towns insulate themselves culturally against the ravages of capital has another implication for identity, this time spatially determined. While we never encountered the patriotism, xenophobia or ‘white identity politics’ that authentocratic commentators from David Goodhart and Maurice Glasman claim are part of working-class DNA (Lentin, 2020), we did often get a sense from those we interacted with of what Alex Niven has called a ‘fluid, dynamic version of regionalism that retains some sense of history, but does not fall victim to bogus nationalist essentialisms’ (2019, p. 95). In contrast to the exclusionary and chauvinistic resonances of ‘flying a tattered Union Jack with pride’ (2019), as per the Express article considered earlier, in a drag bar in Blackpool’s LGBT quarter we meet middle-aged Robert who is proud of his town’s tolerance and diversity. ‘Robert nods toward the drag queen, who’s now been joined by a couple of bald old-timers in tracksuits. “It’s like, she can come here. I can come here. You can come here. We can go where we like, do what we like and nobody minds”’ (p. 133). The more reactionary national or regional identities Niven references do not typically embrace LGBT rights or gender fluidity. Furthermore, contra the authentocratic canard about working-class people despising anything that smacks of high art, taxi driver Robert watches Louis drawing with fascination and informs us that his father was a painter.

‘Blackpool, 2022’. Louis Netter.

The work of the writer and artist in Coast of Teeth is not fundamentally dissimilar. Both forms reflect cogent selections from a vast array of possible subjects. They home in on features in the built and human architecture which are seemingly meaningful and point towards themes and interests that both writer and artist feel are worthy and critical. The rendering of the observed and experienced occur in very different ways in words and drawn marks. And for both, representational aims are layered with subjective, emotionalized beliefs about social care, human decency, capitalism, empathy, and a desire to tell a new story from people who rarely feature in them. In the forgotten corners of this country, the mirror stares back with a bitter and searing truth. Nostalgic notions about seaside delights of old can still beckon and older cultural traditions are sustained but not because of conscious preservation, they are literally left behind, stuck in time, and isolated from the benefits (and downsides) of economic progress. What was most compelling on the many trips that constituted Coast of Teeth was that a trip to the seeming past felt often like a preview of a possible future.

To sum up, we want to suggest that Coast of Teeth’s application of the unique techniques of the reportage illustrator and writer, and its alertness to the ethical sensitivities of representing people and places, has produced insights unavailable to other kinds of ethnographers, whether journalistic or academic. The ways in which we have tried to combine our fieldwork – and the stories and testimonies that emerged from it – with theoretical sense making has led us to inferences about English culture and identity that have at least steered clear of the stereotypes, whichever ideological corner of the media and academia they may be found.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).