Brod Stayrs
19 June 2018 · 20:21 · The Parade, Broadstairs, Kent
The town is called Broadstairs because of these stairs. The name derives from a flight of steps cut into the chalk cliff in the medieval period to give access from the bay below to the Shrine of Our Lady of Bradstow on the cliff above — a place of pilgrimage established in the eleventh century. The earliest forms of the name include Brodsteyr Lynch (1434) and Brod stayrs (1610); Charles Culmer is credited with reconstructing the original steps in 1350. The steps in this photograph are their modern successors, built in concrete and rendered white, descending from The Parade to the beach below — performing exactly the function the medieval originals performed, connecting the upper town to the shore in the same place they have been doing it for more than six centuries.
The composition looks straight down from the cliff edge, which is why the stairways read as abstract geometry rather than as stairs. Seen from above, a symmetrical double flight with a central landing between the two descending arms becomes a diagram of itself: the handrails and balustrades forming the arms of a cross, the landing the intersection, the steps on either side receding into the lower frame. It is not the view the steps were designed to offer. It is the view available from The Parade at 20:21 on a June evening, looking over the railing at the right angle, waiting for the geometry to resolve itself.
The beach huts at the top of the image — their roofs the only visible part from this angle — reduce to simple geometric forms: rectangles and a square, their pitches and ridges forming small triangles of shadow. The deckchair storage boxes are more legible, the word DECKCHAIRS printed on their sides and readable from above. They are ordinary beach infrastructure that the overhead angle has turned into a graphic composition, the same transformation that the stairways undergo. The sand fills the upper third of the frame as a uniform dark-grey texture, the wet foreshore almost indistinguishable from dry sand in the monochrome rendering.
Fujifilm X-Pro 2 · XF 16mm f/1.4 R WR · f/10 · 1/125s · ISO 1000
The X-Pro 2, released in 2016, is Fujifilm's rangefinder-styled flagship body — a 24-megapixel APS-C mirrorless camera with a hybrid viewfinder that switches between a genuine optical viewfinder showing the scene through a tunnel window and a high-resolution electronic viewfinder showing the sensor output. The optical viewfinder projects frame lines corresponding to the attached lens with parallax correction as the lens focuses, working in the manner of a traditional rangefinder without using a mechanical rangefinder mechanism. The body is weather-sealed and all-metal. At f/10 on the 16mm lens (24mm equivalent on APS-C), the depth of field here was effectively infinite — the choice of f/10 reflects a desire for complete sharpness across the frame rather than any constraint from the light.
