If there is one genre of photography less esteemed by historians of photography than the snapshot, it is the seaside portrait. The beach portrait from Coney Island, Brighton Beach, or Margate Sands is the lowest of the low. And yet, such pictures say a great deal about photography. People at the seaside are enjoying themselves; they are ready to spend money; they want souvenirs. What better souvenir than a photograph of themselves? And to the historian, what better window into the way people perceive enjoying themselves? (Another is through the surreptitious pictures of beach fun taken at English resorts like Yarmouth and Ilfracombe by Paul Martin with a disguised camera.)
Seaside portraits have historically fallen into three groups. The first group is a subset of the studio portrait. The second might be called the ‘attraction’ picture: the subject riding a donkey, or with his (or her) face inserted in a lifesize cut-out cartoon resembling a traditional seaside postcard. The third is the ‘walkie’ picture, in effect a snapshot of people on the beach that today would normally be taken by the holidaymaker himself or herself.
All three groups tended to have two things in common: speed and cheapness. Many beach-goers were day trippers, so the service had to be same day at the slowest. Ideally, it was ‘while you wait’. Low prices were dictated by the combination of competition from other photographers and the limited funds of the sitters. Many photographers set up studios at the seaside, whether on permanent premises (which might well be manned only during the summer season) or in tents. The best were photographers who maintained studios elsewhere, and worked the beaches only for the summer season. Others, less well established, had small booths or even handcarts containing all they needed to make a picture, including a miniature darkroom. A few did not even have that: a fraud that worked surprisingly often was to hand the victim a piece of blank paper with the assurance that the picture would appear a few hours later—by which time, of course, they would be back home, far from the ‘photographer’.
Itinerant photographers were already well established at leading beaches by the end of the 1850s. Initially, they used ambrotypes, though the tintype soon displaced the earlier process: quicker to make, cheaper, and more robust. The dry- collodion process was another boost to ease and convenience. By the 1880s photographers were present by the dozen in many of the more popular beaches, so much so that disputes between rival photographers were commonplace, and they remained a familiar sight until the 1950s. Popular in the 1910s and 1920s was the postcard-format photograph, distinguishable from the private snapshot by an order number (sometimes chalked on a slate stuck in the sand). Although the tintype survived for a very long time, after the Second World War the normal approach was either to use a 35 mm camera and an ultra-rapid ‘d'p’ (developing and printing) service, or a paper negative in a ‘while you wait’ camera such as the Janos. The pressure for ‘while you wait’ pictures is one reason why so few beach portraits survive. Many were inadequately fixed, and of the few that were adequately fixed, many were inadequately washed. They might last for a few months, or even a few years, but by the time they were old enough to be fascinating historical records instead of commonplace souvenirs, many had faded to almost nothing or gone an almost uniform brown.
The favoured camera of the 35 mm ‘walkie’ photographer was the Leica, for the abuse it would take: collectors sometimes refer to a worn-out camera as ‘a typical walkie Leica’. At the biggest beaches there would be a number of camera operators working from a single location, where the completed prints would be displayed on boards. Unlike the ‘while you wait’ photographer, who would not normally shoot unless a sale was certain, the 35 mm photographer would often shoot speculatively, relying on squeals of delight and subsequent sales when the holidaymakers saw themselves on display at the booth or shop. By the end of the 1950s, near- universal camera ownership had reduced beach photography to a shadow of its former self. A few photographers went over to Polaroid instant prints, but these were economically marginal because of a combination of high materials costs and ever- diminishing expectations on the part of the public as to what constituted a fair price. Today, there are very few beach photographers and the nearest equivalent to the photographers of yore are probably those studios that do ‘fun’ sepia portraits, typically with the holidaymakers dressed up in Victorian-style clothing—and even these were less popular by the beginning of the 21st century than they had been in the 1970s and 1980s.
Anon.Beach scene, England, 1910s. Postcard
— Roger W. Hicks
Bibliography
- Linkman, A., The Victorians: Photographic Portraits (1993).
- Garner, P., A Seaside Album: Photographs and Memory (2003)
