2012 – ongoing · Eleven stretches of the Atlantic and Channel coast

Coast

The same eleven stretches of shoreline, rephotographed every spring since 2012. Nothing is composed to match the previous year; the repetition is in the date and the place.

Sophie Martin

The project in numbers

41,200

Frames on file

14

Visits

14

Years

Notes from the sheets.

The project began as a way of testing a caption. In 2012 a client asked whether a beach had “always looked like that”, and nobody in the building could answer honestly. So a photographer went back the next spring, and the one after.

The rule

Same week of the year, same eleven places, one lens. No frame is made to rhyme with the previous year’s. The archive does the rhyming: put the sheets from 2012 and 2024 side by side and the coast has moved, the people have not.

What it is for

Nobody commissioned it and it is not for sale as a story. It exists so that when somebody asks what a place looked like, the answer is a contact sheet rather than an opinion. Frames are licensed one at a time, with the year in the caption.

What it has cost

Fourteen springs, about three weeks each, funded from licensing. Two years were rained off entirely and are filed as such.

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