Worthing through old glass

The seafront here is modernist in the way English seaside towns built up in the post-war decades: tower blocks with grid windows above a red storefront, concrete structures under a clear blue sky, the apartment buildings standing back from the pebble beach. Nothing at a human scale, nothing built for the specific quality of light off the Channel. It photographs well despite itself.

A wooden shelter frames shingle beach and sea horizon through its post. Empty bench inside a weathered shelter, the bench black against the grey shingle and pale sky beyond — the bench occupying the space the shelter was built to offer, no one in it. Curved railings and diagonal lines: the old glass renders these in stark black and white, the tonal rendering flatter than a modern lens, the contrast doing the work.

A brick cottage with rust-tiled roof and weathered wood cladding sits in tall grass — the kind of building that got left while the towers went up around it. A pebble beach with a warning sign, sparse vegetation, calm grey sea to the horizon. The pebbles and the warning sign both grey.

I missed focus a few times. The images from those shots have a softness at the centre that's not quite the effect you'd choose. But the edge distortion on the cottage shot — that's the lens doing what it does, the corners bending slightly, the geometry loosening. That's the information I came for.