The sun rises over Brighton beach around 5am during the spring and summer months. I am there for a Sunday morning but the revellers are still there for Saturday night. Along with the revellers you can find the die-hard swimmers tiptoeing down the shingle for their early morning swim entirely unaware of both the bitingly cold temperature of the water and the sprawling hedonism around them. And there are fisherman still rowing their boats and towing their nets.
It is, truly, a wonderful place to be. There is a sense of collectivism and love and its hard to know if the groups of people sitting on the beach are formed on the basis of long held friendships or simply the result of being caught up in the moment, of the shared experience of simply being there as the sun rises.
As an observer of these groups, it’s also hard to know if you are yourself an outsider invading someone else’s space. The fact that I am there for Sunday morning and not Saturday night and I am on my own does seem to set me to one side. I don’t know if the apparent intrusion of a man with camera will compromise this project but I am happy to find out. I set out to capture the moments that make this time and place so special, heading down on a Sunday morning and arriving just before sunrise.
All these images are shot between the hours of sunrise and 9am, on a Sunday morning on Brighton Beach, England over the course of 2017