Tuning in: using photo-talk approaches to explore young people’s everyday relations with local beaches

ABSTRACT

Attunement, connectedness and an ‘in tune-ness’ with places have repeatedly been proposed to be central to sustainable, reciprocal human-environment relations and in turn, wellbeing. In this paper, I examine young people’s emplaced and embodied attunements with local beaches bordering the neighbourhoods in which they live. More specifically, the possibilities of participatory photo-talk approaches for sensing and accessing people’s attunements to beachplaces are proposed. Participants’ views on using photo-talk approaches are foregrounded, including the prompt and momentum given to exploring embodied feelings and experiences. The ways that photo-talk supported a shared exploration of the diverse relational entanglements of human and more-than-human beach entities are also considered. In turn, the value of such approaches for helping to ‘show’ and ‘feel’ place-specific understandings and practices of beaching, including mutually constituted wellbeing a/effects, is proposed. Following in the footprints of others, I suggest the methodological and pedagogical potential of photo-talk approaches to researchers and educators in sport, health, physical education and leisure settings when examining embodied and emplaced experiences of wellbeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental attunement
• bluespaces
• photo-talk
• wellbeing
• more-than-human
• visual methods

Introduction

Beaches, coastlines and oceanic waters have long been recognised as significant to human identity; livelihood; and physical, social, cultural and planetary wellbeing. Recent inter- and transdisciplinary ‘bluespace’ research including that concerned with human-beach relations has heralded, amongst other things, an array of individual and community wellbeing effects of human immersion in and around beach environs (e.g. Bell et al., 2015a; Foley et al., 2019; Foley & Kistemann, 2015; Wheaton et al., 2021). Like all places, however, beaches are inevitably social, political and cultural sites that are understood and experienced differently by individuals and communities, including in respect to their wellbeing a/effects and enhancements. In this paper, I consider young people’s emplaced encounters with local beaches. I make a case for the potential of photo-talk approaches for helping to shed light on the complex, multifarious and always contingent nature of human-beach relations and the inextricable ‘presence’ of the more-than-human in people’s beaching. My usage of the term ‘beaching’ is deliberate. Beaching, as a verb, connotes a sense of a happening, of motion, of being and becoming that is mutually constitutive for humans and beaches. For me, beaching suggests something ‘transindividual’, a coming together and blurring of the ‘edges’ between human bodies and beach bodies that cautions me to not slip too easily into seeing beach places as a thing or merely a passive backdrop for human activity.

Attunement, connectedness and being ‘in tune’ with outdoor places have been proposed to be central to sustainable human and environment relations and in turn, the wellbeing of both humans and more-than-humans (Foley et al., 2019; Panelli & Tipa, 2007; Welch et al., 2021). This paper broadly embraces ideas proffered by the editors of the first special issue about environmental attunement being a ‘leaning in’ to understandings of environment that emphasise ‘a body-mind-culture connection to the lands and waters in a deep sensory and even spiritual sense of care for others’ (Welch et al., 2021, p. 351). Understood as such, environmental attunement is necessarily sensory, embodied and emplaced. Premised on an immutable recognition of humans and environments as inextricably interconnected, conceptualisations such as this have prompted renewed consideration of the reciprocal a/effects of the material and more-than-human world in people’s everyday lives including in sport, health and movement culture.

Here I introduce an ongoing study exploring young people’s attunements with local beaches bordering the neighbourhoods in which they live and more specifically, the ways in which participant-generated photographs and accompanying stories supported this work. As such, I canvas a group of young people’s embodied, sensory expressions of being ‘in’ and ‘out’ of tune with the beaches that define a part of the coastal perimeters of Tauranga, a city in the Bay of Plenty region in Aotearoa New Zealand. In seeking to understand, albeit tentatively, others’ diverse emplaced attunements, I specifically propose the potential and possibilities of photo-talk approaches for helping to shed light on the material and relational nature of human-beach encounters. I trace harmonies and rhythms, drawing attention to the vibrations of the sands, seas, dunes, shells, skies and a kaleidoscope of more-than-human beach matter in young people’s photographs and accompanying stories. I also note disjuncture and discordance; pointing to moments when attunement was threatened, elusive or not felt. In doing so, I mobilise an understanding of attunement as dynamic and fluid, and as always social, cultural and political as well as experienced.

Ocean, beach and human wellbeing

Human and ocean relations have been the focus of burgeoning academic, public and political commentary in recent decades. Scholarly attention in sport, education, health and leisure has identified the potential human health and wellbeing benefits and holistic enhancements of bluespace interactions including coastal waterways and beaches (e.g. Foley et al., 2019; Humberstone, 2015; Olive & Wheaton, 2021). Bell et al. (2015a) for example, highlight the rich ‘therapeutic’ wellbeing enhancements of coastal interactions for residents in South West England across symbolic, achieving, immersive and social ‘experience dimensions’. An array of wellbeing-related benefits reported across different populations and locales internationally include in families’ social interaction (e.g. Ashbullby et al., 2013); contemplation and reflection about life (e.g. Coleman & Kearns, 2015); mindfulness and feelings of restoration, renewal or mental wellbeing (e.g. Garrett et al., 2019; Gascon et al., 2017; Kelly, 2018); capacity and opportunities for physical activity (Ashbullby et al., 2013; Pasanen et al., 2019); personal and social change (e.g. Britton, 2018; Britton et al., 2020; Wheaton et al., 2017); and in place and ‘nature’ attachments (Denton & Aranda, 2020; Waiti & Awatere, 2019). The incremental wellbeing effects reported for those living in close proximity to coastal waterways (e.g. Garrett et al., 2019) have also been noted. Scholarly analysis such as this, advances understandings of the potential scope and power of bluespace engagements for human health and wellbeing. It also points to the utility of continuing to seek to understand the complexity and diversity of different people’s everyday beach relations, including in respect to their situatedness, and the ongoing impacts of significant global events like the COVID-19 pandemic (Jellard & Bell, 2021; Wheaton, 2022; Wheaton et al., 2021).

Beach and ocean-based leisure, sport and education cultures and practices including in surfing (e.g. Caddick et al., 2015; Evers, 2019; lisahunter & Stoodley, 2021; Waiti & Awatere, 2019; Wheaton et al., 2017), ocean swimming (e.g. Britton & Foley, 2021; Costello et al., 2019; Foley, 2015); waka ama (Liu, 2021; Waiti & Wheaton, 2022), windsurfing (e.g. Humberstone, 2015) and sailing (e.g. Brown, 2022; Zink, 2015) have also garnered increasing research scrutiny through examination of the ways in which human relations with ocean places are experienced, conceptualised and expressed. Emergent in the varied analyses are rich accounts of the embodied, sensory, temporal and fluid nature of ‘in situ’ beach-human relations; the potentially enabling and deleterious wellbeing a/effects; and the ways in which the health and wellbeing of humans and of beaches is understood and practiced as mutually interdependent (e.g. Evers & Phoenix, 2022; Wheaton et al., 2021; White et al., 2016).

While acknowledging the multiple ways that human relations with beaches, seas and coastal environs can and might productively shape and contribute to a sense of identity, connection to place and holistic wellbeing; universalised Eurocentric and Western¹ understandings of human and ocean relations have been critiqued for their ontological and practical exclusions, silences and inequities (Wheaton et al., 2020). Consideration of the complex ways in which ‘factors’ like race, culture, gender, sexuality, age and class imprint individual and community understandings of, access to, and experiences with coastal places has been forthcoming (e.g. Foley et al., 2019; Phoenix et al., 2021). Olive and Wheaton (2021) note ‘cultures of exclusion’ in the ‘hydrophilic turn’ (p. 7), and the importance of ‘placed’ analyses when considering the reciprocal wellbeing a/effects of ocean-human relations.

In this respect and given the context of my study, it is important to note that Māori, the tangata whenua or indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand, understand a placed conception of wellbeing as intimately tying human wellbeing to that of places and all living entities (e.g. Durie, 1998; Marsden & Royal, 2003). A presupposed relational ontology of ‘interconnection, holism and balance’ (Ahuriri-Driscoll, 2014, p. 37) challenges dominant nature and culture binaries by bringing culture and environment to the fore (Panelli & Tipa, 2007) and by emphasising the necessity of relating to Papatūānuku² and all worldly ‘kin’ with ‘reverence, love and responsibility’ (Walker in Marsden & Royal, 2003, p. 35). Scholars such as Waiti and Awatere (2019), Phillips (2020) and Waiti and Wheaton (2022) provide important analyses of Māori connections to oceans and coastal places across time and of how ways of knowing, customs and practices infuse and expand understanding of sport, health and movement cultures including in surfing, waka-ama and water safety.

The sands from which I speak

The study that this paper draws on centres an approximately 21-kilometre sweep of coastline running from the sacred mountain of Mauao (Mount Maunganui) to the mouth of the Kaituna River that lies east. This coastline holds enormous significance to local iwi and many living in and beyond the region and is already a storied placescape shaped by and shaping a complex array of social and cultural memories, histories and understandings. I live along this coastline. It takes me 491 big steps traversing two short streets, one beach access/tsunami alleyway and the main beach road to reach a sandy access path directly overlooking the Pāpāmoa Beach coastline. As a year-round beacher, it is fair to say that salt air, sea water and sand permeate my everyday life and have done so for the twenty years I have lived here. It is also relevant to note that my salty, sandy footprints imprint this study and every aspect of the research process; as does my biography as a middle aged, Pākehā (a New Zealander of European descent), woman who beaches every day. I acknowledge the multiplicity of ways I am inevitably immersed and implicated in every aspect of this research (see Olive, 2020 for a relevant discussion about this point and researcher subjectivity).

Visual approaches in this study

My study examines how young people, aged 16–25 years, understand, seek and produce wellbeing through relational engagement with the dynamic phenomenon of local beach places and any responsibilities to these places they see to be a part of this. Living in a neighbourhood on the seaward side of the major highway networks along the designated part of the coast was an important criterion for participation given the coastline is a visible, defining and everyday rather than exceptional landscape ‘feature’ that is never more than a couple of kilometres away. However, there was no predetermined frequency, form or nature of beaching required for participation in the study. A diverse myriad of beach-based ‘activity’ was referred to in research conversations including surfing, swimming, surf ski paddling, walking, lifeguarding, running, ‘chilling’ with friends, eating food, reading, sunbathing, yoga, sitting round and people and beach-watching either by themselves or with family or friends.

Twelve people were recruited using a combination of purposive and snowballing strategies (Bryman, 2016). This included disseminating information about the study utilising my existing networks established through living by and actively engaging with the coastline for the last 20 years and interactions with young people in the target age range through work in tertiary education in the wider Tauranga region. Participants were diverse: at high school (1), a recent school leaver (1), in various forms of tertiary study (6) or in full time employment (4). They self-identified as women (9), men (2) and Takatāpui³ (1); and as Māori (3), Samoan and Māori (1), Samoan and Pākehā (1) and Pākehā (7). Ethical approval for the study was gained from the Human Research Ethics Committee at The University of Waikato (under HREC2019#03).

Prioritising the embodied, sensory, sociomaterial entanglements of human and beaches in this study encouraged my use of research approaches that might permit an open-ended and mutual exploration of human-beach interconnections and practices. These were features which participant-generated photo-talk approaches appeared to offer. I had no predetermined sense of what young people’s responses to taking and sharing photographs in this study might look like. However, I was acutely aware that talking with me in a research setting about feelings, senses or sensory things could well be considered by some participants to be a too personal, random or possibly ‘weird’ topic to breach. In using this research approach, I hoped that participants’ self-curated photographs might proffer a more comfortable entry point for our collaborative exploration of what mattered in their everyday, embodied and emplaced beach relations which is not necessarily easy to articulate in words.

Visual, sensory, mobile and arts-based methods have been vibrantly used in a host of geocultural locales; disciplinary contexts including sport, leisure, physical education and health; and with eclectic participant groups including children and young people. Bluespace research employing visual and multisensorial approaches exemplifies the innovative ways they have been put to work to understand, interrogate and communicate human-ocean relations. Instructive contemporary examples include photographs created at the direction of senior island-dwellers (Coleman & Kearns, 2015); the use of mobile video and sound recordings while swimming in the sea (Denton & Aranda, 2020); production of personalised geonarrative maps of everyday blue and greenspace engagement using Global Positioning System (GPS) and accelerometer data that were ‘co-analysed’ with participants (Bell et al., 2015b); and ‘multiperspective mobile in situ technologies’ in surfing (lisahunter & Stoodley, 2021, p. 89). Speaking to the power of the latter, lisahunter and Stoodley (2021) propose unique possibilities for extending understanding of ocean engagement including from ‘multiple more-than-human perspectives’ (p. 92).

Photo-talk approaches, sometimes called participatory photo elicitation or auto-photography (Butz & Cooke, 2017), typically combine participant-generated photographs and oral conversations about these. Although not a new methodological approach, participatory visual methods have been broadly used in health-related research with young people (e.g. Allen, 2009; Guillemin & Drew, 2010; Lomax, 2015). They are proposed to offer productive potential to facilitate a collaborative exploration of the affective intensities of people’s ‘everyday’ experiences and lives including their materiality. Following Pink (2011), I understand photographs to be a ‘multisensory artefact’ with an evocative potential for exploring participants’ ‘aesthetic worlds’ (p. 608), their imaginings about and sensory embodiments of beach relations, and socially and culturally constructed understandings and practices.

The research activity centring on photo-talks took place from late 2019 until mid 2021, a period that was reconfigured and extended due to the arrival and impacts of COVID-19 and the accompanying national and regional lockdowns that occurred at different periods during this timeframe in Aotearoa New Zealand from late March 2020. An introductory research conversation to get to know each other in a research context and to discuss the study, the photograph taking and gain informed consent was held either face to face (7) or on zoom (5). At this time, broad and open-ended instructions to take as many or as few photographs as participants wished to express what the beach means to them were shared. The second interview, the photo-talk conversation, occurred face to face (7) or on zoom (5) a few weeks later at a time that was mutually suitable. In the case of one participant, only one extended zoom photo-talk was held due to their limited availability at the time. All participants were asked to choose a pseudonym at the conclusion of the photo-talk.

A total of 79 photographs and textual commentary were shared by 11 of the 12 participants. Photo-talk conversations were driven organically by the photographs and concluded with questions about participants’ experiences of the photograph taking processes. One participant, Layla, did not share photographs produced for the purposes of this study as they had not been beaching locally in the extended period between research conversations. However, Layla showed and discussed photographs that they had on their camera reel in the second conversation and surmised that any photographs that would have been taken for the study would have been of beach views that did not require any contact with sand and sea water. The sensorial specificity and clarity of this response became a key discussion prompt in Layla’s second research conversation.

Analysis was of an ongoing and iterative nature occurring throughout and beyond the extended period of the photo-talk conversations. A recursive backwards and forwards process of (re)familiarising myself with participants’ photographs and accompanying textual transcripts, and the short descriptive story notes and researcher reflections written after the transcription of each of the photo-talk conversations was central to my initial meaning-making and ongoing thematic analysis. Drew and Guillemin’s (2014) three-pronged framework of cumulative interpretative engagement and analytic processes for participant-generated images provided guidance. Throughout, I aimed to keep Phoenix and Rich’s (2016, p. 144) call to balance a systematic analytic process and the ‘craft’ of ‘doing (and indeed feeling)’ visual analysis firmly in play.

Tuning in to others’ attunements

To foreground the potential of photo-talk for exploring human-beach attunements, it is timely to examine participants’ views of taking ‘talking photographs’ in this study, including in respect to the momentum ‘thinking with’ photographs (Pyyry, 2015) gave to both the taking of photographs and the photo-talk conversations themselves. As is discussed, there was almost unanimous support from the participants for the productive affordance of photo-talk to exploring sensory and embodied beach meanings and relations.

Taking talking photos, talking taking photos

Initially I wasn’t sure how it might help, but as I started taking the photos I thought it actually does make a lot of sense. Sometimes it’s hard to describe or articulate that stuff (Laura)

It was just interesting as well. When I look here [at the photographs laid out on the table], I’ve never really thought of all these things together. So it’s good (Rose)

For these young people, a repeatedly expressed benefit of taking and sharing photographs was the prompt and momentum that they gave to conversations that had simply begun with me inviting them to tell me about their photographs in whatever way, sequence or manner that they wanted to. Many participants acknowledged that photographs ‘jogged’ their memories, seemingly transporting them back to the particular beachspacetime encounter and ‘the memories of who I was with and what I was doing’ (Emma). A photograph of an autumnal sunset that Emma had taken weeks earlier for example, spurred an extended dialogue about skateboarding to the beach, the other people and dogs beaching at the same time, the presence of a videographer filming a surfer that she and her sibling had tried to avoid getting in the way of, the ice creams that they were both devouring, and an absolute ‘love’ for the colours and ‘feel’ of the ‘candy floss skies’ and inky-coloured sands and seas at the time.

Participants also valued the prod to recollecting the kinaesthetic and sensory elements of beaching that might otherwise have been challenging to express to someone else or possibly overlooked if it was just a conversation. As Charlie explained, ‘I think it’s way easier cos it’s kinda like I’m there when I look at the photos. I can see it as well … I can talk about something that I was actually doing’, in this case surfing, that would otherwise have been ‘really hard’. Photographs of waves, seas, surfboards, surf craft, fishing gear and swim wear proved to be a conduit for some participants to describe, sometimes at length, both their feelings about specific beaching moments and the ‘feel’ of being immersed in the moment be it walking or sitting seaside, paddling into pounding onshore waves, surfing at sunset, swimming ‘out the back’, blue water diving or lolling around playing in the sea. William noted the sense of cleansing they felt walking as the ocean ‘sucks out all of the negative energy’. A shot of Manawa’s legs caught mid stride walking barefoot on the sand with a short plume of sand flying off the toes of one foot evoked a sense of being right there again and how that felt in the moment: ‘You can just feel this photo, I could just feel the cold sand, like instantly. It just astounds me how much you can feel a photo’.

Relatedly, many participants perceived photographs also helped me to ‘experience’ these moments alongside them. As William suggested, photographs meant I could ‘see it from our perspective’ rather than having to rely on words alone, and generate questions about ‘something that might be obvious to me, but isn’t to you’ (Jake). In this sense, photographs as Pyyry (2015, p. 150) argues, gave a tangible ‘“push” to thinking’ for participants and myself collectively. My own familiarity with the coastline and recognition of seemingly everyday landmarks and temporal beach rhythms in photographs like particular beach access pathways, a stand of Norfolk Pine trees along from Pāpāmoa Domain, the curve of the coast looking along towards Mauao, or tidal patterns at the time, meant I could sometimes also ‘locate’ myself at a particular part of the beach alongside and with the person. This is somewhat akin to some of the understandings of and benefits suggested for mobile methods like walk- or go-along interviews where researchers and participants jointly see and move in particular contexts together in recognition of the fluid, material and discursive nature of emplaced experience (e.g. Lynch, 2020). This sense of me also being (contingently) present, seemed to aid the conversational exchange and flow of some photo-talks, helped spur conversation as participants sought to clarify what they saw and felt, and served to reiterate the entangled and active contribution of researchers/myself in the encounter of the research interview itself. However, and notably, participants’ photo-talk also served to repeatedly challenge me not to assume that my own embodied understandings of specific beachplaces or beaching were shared by others, nor underestimate the influence of ‘geographies of difference’ on personal stories, points that I return to later in the paper.

Photographs were also a starting point for some participants to discuss what was not materially evident and its relevance to beaching. For example, a very dark and blurry photograph of wet sand illuminated in the camera flash that Manawa had accidentally taken just after dark was still shared for the memory of the sociality that beaching evoked. This was something that I would never have been able to be deduce merely from looking at it:

I included it not for what it was, but I included it cos it kinda reminded me of nights on the beach with my friends in summer. Although that’s not actually what happened, that’s what it reminds me of. Hot summer nights at the beach, hanging out at the beach.

Somewhat similarly, Jake’s image of a laptop computer screen on a table at home, while not featuring beach environs specifically, nevertheless expressed the sense that even when not physically beachside ‘the beach kinda follows me home’. In talking this through, we got to pursue an exploration of the deep, embodied feel for shifting winds, sea swells and changing tides that Jake had developed over many years of regular and varied beaching that allowed him to now use online weather, swell and tide forecasts alongside observation of the wind patterns at home to judge and tune in to ‘what’s happening even when you’re not at the beach’. This process of going beyond the photographs has been noted repeatedly by other researchers (e.g. Cooper, 2017; Pyyry, 2015). It was also one of many occasions that participants’ photo-talk demanded my active and ongoing reflexivity about the slippery and fluid boundaries between humans and beachplaces; where beaches supposedly start and end; and consideration of the unanticipated ways that embodied attunements linger, are expressed and are felt well beyond a specific yet fleeting temporal encounter.

A final aspect of participants’ talk about taking ‘talking photographs’ relates to the demands and requirements associated with the process itself. A niggling question I had about using participant-generated photographs was whether they might be off-putting, burdensome, or create some kind of performance pressure or sense of expectation in their actualisation even though I had endeavoured to communicate that this was not the case. In particular, I anticipated the difference between young people’s everyday photograph-taking practices, and that some of the accompanying ethical guidelines including consent and privacy that participants were asked to uphold when producing images for the purpose of the study would put them off. Photographs and photographing were however normalised by most participants as just something that they did as part of their everyday lives, including when beaching for some. Advantages of participatory photography approaches in physical education, health and place-based research with young people in respect to its ease, fun and usefulness in exploring places and in promoting thinking, reflection and conversation (e.g. Dennis et al., 2009; Drew et al., 2010; Enright & O'Sullivan, 2012), appeared to be borne out in many similar words and descriptions from participants.

Tuning in to the more-than-human

Yeah, cos the beach is not just us. Not just humans. And so I wanted to capture that (Charlotte)

The utility of photo-talk approaches for helping me to tune into participants’ beach relations including more-than-human entities was unexpectedly high. I found the sheer preponderance of sands, beach grasses, seas, dunes, shells, skies and all manner of beach matter in images ‘opened the door’ for conversations that began to plumb the sensory materiality of beach relations. For example, when Manawa talked about a photograph taken from the end of the access pathway above the beach before an afternoon walk at the very outset of our second research conversation, she immediately pointed out her love of the sand, seas and grasses that filled the image and the ways that these were ofttimes visually and sensorily calming to her. Relatedly, three photographs that Marie shared had her lycra-clad running or yoga-posing body framed strongly by the blue, white, green and grey hues of the sands, skies and seas surrounding her. Going to some lengths to figure out how to use a tripod for the first time to create these ‘selfies’ had been necessary, Marie insisted, to ensure her moving body was firmly in the frame with the beach: ‘The beach is the most important part to me … I wanted to capture not just me running, but I needed to capture the beach as well cos they’re interlinked’. What this meant sensorily in terms of vivid smells, sounds and sights was then explained.

The potential of photographs for accessing the active and material beings in beach-human entanglements was also patently evident through Maggie and Bee, her dog, who featured in four of Maggie’s five photographs. Beaching for Maggie was all about ‘the whole dynamic’ between herself, Bee and the beach; ‘how Bee’s feeling and what he likes about the place and everything’, and ‘what he’s up to and how that sort of affects me’. Talking about a photograph of Bee running along a trail in the sand dunes with their ears flapping and nose on high alert in pursuit of some ‘wonderful thing’, Maggie surmised that Bee’s everchanging responses to beachplace heightened her own senses, making it ‘more of a sensory experience for me as well’. A simple lift and perking up of Bee’s head and nose signalled something of intrigue was close by, which had the roll-on effect of piquing Maggie’s own awareness of beach life. Continuously responding to Bee in beachplace and wondering ‘What are you smelling?’ and ‘What’s so interesting?’ meant Maggie through Bee noticed how many pheasants and rabbits lived in the sand dunes in parts of Pāpāmoa Beach, the meandering routes other dogs had recently taken given Bee’s lingering attention to particular spots, exactly where seagulls were currently poised, the proximity of other human beachgoers, and recently beached logs or seaweed. With Bee alongside, Maggie was more in tune with the constantly changing conglomerate of sights, sounds and smells than she might otherwise be seemingly through a co-mingling of the sensations she and Bee experienced. Bee’s ‘happiness’ and ‘sense of freedom’ that Maggie proposed was evident in the photographs not only communicated ‘what he’s up to’ but also ‘how that sort of affects me, brings me joy and stuff’.

While I cannot deduce the emphasis that Maggie might have otherwise given to Bee in the absence of photographs, I found that Bee’s striking material presence, and unspoken yet active involvement in our photo-talk, insisted I retained an open-mindedness about who the so-called research participants in my study actually were. Beaching and beach relations were necessarily inclusive of a myriad of more-than-human life for these young people and photographs helped to both ‘ground’ and set in flight our dialogue about particular beach encounters, memories and understandings. A photograph taken while standing thigh deep in the sea looking along the coastline towards Mauao to show things ‘from the water’s point of view’ (Rose), the silent yet seemingly always important presence of Mauao in the distance in Laura’s photographs, or images of sand dunes and dune grasses that were a ‘really important’ part of beach life and ‘needed to be protected because they protect us’ repeatedly asserted a need for me to recognise that beach relations, as Charlotte argued, were not just about ‘us humans’.

Having proposed the value of photo-talk approaches for the impetus given to accessing and exploring the more-than-human in young people’s beach relations, I now briefly argue their contribution to expanding awareness of the care and concern embedded in many of these relations.

Tuning in to relations of care

An ethos of reciprocity for the more-than-human was evident in many photo-talks. An illustration of this relates to William, who sought out the sandy shores of nearby Pāpāmoa Beach when they got a ‘feeling like I need to go’. Photographs of expanses of sand, waves, water reflections on the shoreline, and the setting sun underscored that for William, beaching was intimately associated with ‘cleansing’; a ‘spiritual’ and ‘healing’ cultural practice of ‘replenishing of mauri’ that left them feeling refreshed, calm, and ‘ready to go’. Interestingly, and in contrast to my own experiences and preconceptions, cleansing for William was not associated with immersion in (sea) water rather walking along the sand feeling it ‘squishing’ in their toes and listening to all the beach sounds. Furthermore, this sense of rejuvenation was not guaranteed unless the beach was ‘nice’ and ‘clean’, which is what William said was evident in their photographs. Even the sight and smell of sea weed and kelp on the beach post-storm or a high tide was a ‘bluck’ reminder to William of sewage and in turn, a ‘yucky’ and ‘icky’ deterrent to cleansing.

Examining the visual and affective meanings and practices associated with ‘clean’ and in turn cleansing with William, inspired a conversation that pitched backwards and forwards in unexpected ways and that emphasised the material-temporal happening of beaching and the experienced social realities produced. We explored ideas about the ‘gross’ rubbish that some humans leave that we both abhorred (and always picked up), the inclusion of washed-out footprints in the first photograph that symbolised this message of ‘not leaving anything other than your footprints’, and how William understood the changing sandbanks and recent stormy high tides to be Papatūānuku sending ‘a warning that we need to stop destroying her’ but ‘none of us are listening’.

Other participants also considered local beaches were ‘taken for granted’, and detailed multiple actions of care and respect that were integral to their beaching. These included avoiding eroding the sand dunes that Laura suggested ‘were a key connection between the land and sea’ and the constant picking up of the litter and plastic waste found in and around the beach, sand dunes and coastal access ways and carparks. Reflecting on the dawn and duskscapes in their photographs and the multiple ways that the ocean as a ‘life source’ sustained their own and others’ holistic wellbeing, Wiremu summed up this sense of reciprocity in connection by insisting that ‘respect for the moana’ needed to be fundamental to people’s beach engagements.

Tuning in?

I wouldn’t really know what to draw on and what to talk about if we didn’t have reference to photos … . it reminded me of different things and sparked different conversations (Manawa)

I probably wouldn’t have talked for anywhere as long, you probably would have got 5 or 10 min out of me. Photos are definitely good prompts and help you recall your experiences (Laura)

Tuning in to the diversity and complexity of people’s sociomaterial entanglements with outdoor places is important contemporaneously. This is particularly so for sport, health and physical educators aiming to expand understanding of the complex interconnections between human and environmental health and wellbeing. In this paper, I have specifically argued the value of photo-talk approaches for supporting this work and for ensuring young people’s ideas, feelings and embodied experiences are centralised in pedagogic and research interactions.

As Phoenix and Rich (2016) attest, visual approaches are well established in sport, education, health and leisure scholarship. Accordingly, I am not suggesting that these approaches or their affordances are necessarily new or innovative, nor arguing the universality of these young peoples’ beach relations to other social, cultural and environmental locales. My modest call here is to (re)direct attention to the rich pedagogic opportunities that photo-talk approaches offer educators who are seeking to examine and understand human and more-than human relations with outdoor places.

Relatedly, I note that the creative and pedagogic potential of photo-talk approaches for exploring and promoting environmental attunement extends well beyond what has been highlighted in this paper. I see a host of rich possibilities for utilising visual and sensory methods that build on the lively ways these have previously been put to work (see for example ideas in lisahunter, 2020). The use of group photo-talk could also provide a potent stimulus for expanding awareness and understanding of diverse experiences of (dis)connection between humans and more-than-humans in outdoor settings and the reciprocal wellbeing a/effects.

From a personal standpoint, one completely unanticipated ripple effect of using photo-talk approaches has been a lingering sense of ‘carrying’ traces of these research conversations in my subsequent beaching. I continue to recollect and feel the first touch of the sun hitting my skin that Wiremu treasured, the ‘wallpaper skies’ that Charlotte featured, and the ‘tail of the movement’ highlighted in footprints in one of Manawa’s photographs. I know my repulsion and my anger at discarded rubbish and plastic surfing the shores are shared; and have a much finer sense of the ways that sand squishes, penetrates, irritates and sometimes excludes.

Acknowledgements

I respectfully and gratefully acknowledge the human and more-than-human participants and collaborators in this study. I also acknowledge and thank Lisette Burrows, Belinda Wheaton and Anna Rolleston for their feedback on this paper and ongoing support and guidance of the wider study. The valuable feedback of the anonymous reviewers and special issue and journal editors is also gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Wheaton et al. (2021) as an example of discussion about Western and Mātauranga Māori knowledge systems in relation to ocean-human health and wellbeing and leisure.

2 Papatūānuku is the “personified form of whenua-the natural earth”, understood by Māori as the “...Primordial Mother who married Rangi (Sky Father) and became the female parent who birthed the departmental gods and humankind” (Marsden & Royal, 2003, p. 44).

3 This participant explained that Takatāpui was a Māori term that “literally encompasses your sexuality and gender identity” and where it was unknown to people, they would then identify as “gender fluid”.