Broadstairs Infrared
Fujifilm X-E1 (720nm IR conversion) · XF 14mm f/2.8 R · f/11 · 1/60 s · ISO 320
Tuesday 19 June 2018 · Broadstairs, Kent
The beach shops building at Viking Bay has the slightly improbable quality of a stage set: a long run of white-painted arches dressed with hand-lettered signs for ice cream, slush, donuts and fish and chips, facing directly onto the sand as though the beach itself were its intended audience. In infrared, with the 720nm conversion pushing the sky towards near-black, the building becomes something more theatrical than it manages in ordinary light. The cumulus clouds massing behind it take on a weight that the June afternoon itself did not quite possess — it was a warm day, a high of around 23°C and no rain, the kind of settled early summer weather that fills the beach — but infrared renders the sky according to its own logic, and the result is something closer to atmosphere than documentary record.
I was there as a guest of the Herne Bay Photographic Club, invited along by my old friend Aliy, who is a member. Photo walks of this kind have a particular dynamic: a loose group, each person stopping independently, no common itinerary beyond a shared location, the conversation fragmentary and the pace unpredictable. Broadstairs on a June evening is well-suited to that kind of wandering. Viking Bay is compact enough to cover thoroughly on foot, and the variety of subjects — beach, harbour, promenade, the layered architecture of the seafront — sustains attention across a few hours without any sense of repetition.
The bay takes its name from an event well-suited to the dramatic qualities infrared tends to impose. In 1949, the Danish government commissioned an authentic replica of a Gokstad Viking ship — named Hugin after one of Odin's two ravens — and sailed it across from Denmark to Broadstairs to mark the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the landing of Hengist and Horsa on the Thanet coast. The beach had been known simply as Main Bay before that, its name changed by the occasion and the ship's arrival. The Hugin is now landlocked at Pegwell Bay a few miles to the south, but the name remained.
Fujifilm X-E1 (720nm IR conversion) · XF 14mm f/2.8 R · f/11 · 1/90 s · ISO 200
This second image was taken later in the evening — the filename records 18:40, though in mid-June in east Kent the light at that hour is still full and warm, with sunset nearly three hours away. The composition looks along the base of the harbour wall from the sand, the wooden stair structure ascending to the walkway above, tyre tracks sweeping across the foreground where a tractor or beach vehicle had turned earlier in the day. Two people are visible at the top of the stairs, sitting with the view behind them. Beyond the wall, the harbour building occupies the right-hand side of the frame, and sails catch the light to the far right.
The harbour at Viking Bay is small and functional, more working landing than marina. A pier has existed at Broadstairs since the 1530s, when George Culmer — a local shipbuilder whose family had operated yards here since at least 1495 — constructed the first structure and the gatehouse that would protect it from tidal surges and unwanted visitors. In 1540 a more permanent stone version was built, the arch incorporating grooves for a portcullis that can still be seen. This gatehouse was renamed York Gate in 1797 in honour of the Duke of York, and it remains the narrow entrance point through which Harbour Street reaches the seafront. The town that grew around it — originally called Bradstowe, meaning broad place in Anglo-Saxon — built much of its early economy on shipbuilding and fishing, before smuggling and eventually seaside tourism reshaped it across the 18th and 19th centuries.
The IR treatment suits the harbour scene particularly well. Wet stone, rope and salt-weathered wood carry texture in monochrome that colour can sometimes flatten, and the darkness of the water underneath the boats in the last image is an effect of the conversion rendering clear water as near-black — the infrared wavelengths absorbed rather than reflected by the surface. In ordinary light the harbour is a cheerful and accessible place; in this form it feels older and more considered.
Fujifilm X-E1 (720nm IR conversion) · XF 14mm f/2.8 R · f/9 · 1/75 s · ISO 200
The coin-operated telescope on the promenade above the bay carries a sticker that reads "CAN YOU SEE THE SEA MONSTER?" — a question positioned with some confidence given that the view from that point is a stretch of the English Channel in which sea monsters have not been reliably reported. The 50p charge for the viewpoint is noted in smaller print above. The telescope is the kind of fixture so common on British seafront promenades that it tends to become invisible, part of the furniture of a seaside day out: the coin goes in, the timer runs, and most people find they are looking at Ramsgate rather than anything anomalous. What makes it work as a photograph here is the relationship between the machine and the ironwork behind it — the ornate cast-iron railings of the promenade balustrade, the matching pair of lamp posts receding into the dark sky — and the fact that in infrared, with the sky rendered nearly featureless, the label's question acquires a certain deadpan weight.
The promenade above Viking Bay runs along the clifftop between the beach access points, with Bleak House — where Dickens wrote much of David Copperfield during his extended visits to Broadstairs in the 1840s and 1850s — visible from the eastern end. The lamp standards visible here are part of the Victorian seafront furniture that gives the promenade much of its character: tall, slightly elaborate, placed at intervals along the balustrade wall. In this image they recede into the background behind the telescope, rendered as silhouettes against the near-black IR sky, their globes still recognisable but emptied of any sense of light.
The group was drifting at this point in the afternoon — some people still down on the beach, others further along the promenade. A photo walk operates without a brief, and the subjects that draw attention tend to be the ones that would be easy to walk past on any other day. The telescope is one of those: an entirely ordinary piece of seaside equipment, unremarkable until the light falls across it in a particular way, or until someone has stuck a sticker on it that makes you stop.
Fujifilm X-E1 (720nm IR conversion) · XF 14mm f/2.8 R · f/9 · 1/60 s · ISO 400
The final image was taken looking straight down from the harbour wall onto two small boats moored below. The larger of the two has a small mast with what appears to be a furled sail; both carry the round white rope fenders typical of small working or leisure craft. The registration visible on the larger boat reads B492 — though the boat is oriented away from the camera, so the number appears upside down in the frame. The water between the hulls and the wall is rendered completely black by the infrared conversion — absorbed rather than reflected — which strips out the usual blue-green of a harbour and replaces it with something more abstract. The seaweed and algae on the stone below the waterline appear almost white, the infrared wavelengths reflecting strongly from organic matter in the same way they do from grass and foliage on land.
The harbour at Viking Bay holds a small number of these working and leisure boats, launched and retrieved over the slipway at the eastern end of the beach. The bay's orientation — south-east facing, sheltered by the chalk headlands on either side — makes it a reasonable working anchorage in most conditions, though it offers limited protection from the east in a strong blow. The tidal range at Broadstairs is substantial, as it is throughout east Kent, and boats left on moorings in the inner harbour sit on the bottom at low water. The framing here, top-down with the wall edge and jetty planking in the lower portion of the frame, removes the boats from any wider context and turns them into an exercise in shape, texture and the abstract qualities of reflected and absorbed light.
It was, by any measure, a productive evening's walking. The compact geography of Viking Bay gives a photo walk a useful focus — there is enough to occupy several hours without the group dispersing across too wide an area — and the 720nm infrared conversion earns its keep on a day with cumulus cloud and direct sun, where the contrast between foliage, sky and built surfaces is at its most pronounced. A warm June evening in Broadstairs, by these four images, has been made to look considerably more dramatic than it felt at the time.
The Fujifilm X-E1 was Fujifilm's first X-series body at its 2013 launch, and was converted to 720nm infrared in 2018. At that wavelength, foliage reflects strongly and renders near-white, while skies absorb infrared and appear dark to near-black in the resulting monochrome conversion.
