The British seaside towns of Max Miechowski’s Land Loss lie just outside of our collective imagination. Focusing on the east coast of the country, the photographer spent three years journeying through the communities living on its edge.
The coastal areas he visited are not the colorful resorts you may have come across in pictures, immortalized by a bevy of photographers, professional and amateur alike; seaside towns that tourists flock in and out of each summer to revel in the all too precious rays of British sunshine until their cheeks turn pink. These are towns whose inhabitants have chosen to live day in, day out at the mercy of the elements, existing with the knowledge that the land they live on is set to disappear in the not-too-distant future.
Based in London, Miechowski’s previous projects have focused on his close environs, his shared square mile leading him to photograph his neighbors and local community. After many years of paying close attention to the city, he needed a change of landscape and felt pulled in the direction of the east coast—an area not too far from his childhood home of Lincolnshire. Like many other Brits, the seaside was a much-loved port of call that he remembers vividly. “It’s not possible to be more than 70 miles from the coast in the UK, and that naturally forms a sense of our identity here,” he says.
Traveling with camera in hand, the landscape he encountered revealed a different, more fragile topography than the one that lived in his memories. “The towns I visited were so much smaller than I remembered, but the sea felt so vast,” the photographer recounts. “It was whilst traveling along the coast, going from town to town, that I learnt about the coastal erosion. The resort towns are protected by sea defences, yet the smaller villages and hamlets on the periphery were left to disappear. A lot of houses had been lost to the sea in 2018, during the big storm nicknamed the ‘Beast from the East.’”
The east coast is regarded as the fastest eroding coastline in Europe, the naturally-occuring process that has been happening for a long time now becoming more unpredictable in recent years due to the climate crisis. In his research, Miechowski discovered a map that predicted how the impact of erosion would play out in the areas he was visiting. The diagnosis was somber. Each year brought with it the forecast of gradual erasure; a path, a group of houses, a whole village, all destined to be lost to the sea. “It astounded me to imagine that the land I was standing on and the houses I was looking at would soon turn to nothing,” he says.
Driven by this realization, the photographer set about doing what photographers do: attempting to capture these places before they disappeared. While the existential threat of erosion looms large outside of the frame, the tone of Miechowski’s photographs conjure a much quieter story, indicative of the strange sense of time that characterizes life in our strange new reality. Expecting dramatic storms and rough seas, he was met with a much slower-burn. As he describes in his statement: “The land felt still, the waters were calm, and time moved slowly.”
For Miechowski, place has always been a portal to people and turning from the land towards its inhabitants marked a turning point in the project. Weaving intimate portraits and landscapes together, Land Loss conveys the singular experience of living on these disappearing cliffs. His portraits are deeply intimate, the product of revisiting the people he met multiple times and talking at length about what brought them to the sea and how they will feel once it greets them at their door.
From families that had lived in the area for generations to those who had recently moved—in the knowledge that soon they might need to move again—the connective tissue of the project is a shared fate. “While each person had their own perspective on the erosion, they were all naturally connected by this shared experience,” the photographer says. “Some are neighbors or family members, and some live hundreds of miles apart from one another. I photographed people who were very engaged with their communities as well as people who lived quite isolated lives. It was the cliffs and their experience of living in this landscape that tied everything together.”
The story woven across Miechowski’s sunkissed images tells of the intimate relationship between people and place. Photographing mainly in the soft light of early morning and golden hour, he captures the magic of the coast—the hypnotic beauty that draws people to live in such an unstable landscape. Bathed in light, people of all ages are pictured in moments of reflection and stillness. Small traces of decay are observed in the cracks of their homes; a broken window, a bucket teetering on a sagging shelf. There is great beauty undercut with a sense of anticipation for what is to come.
In its melancholy, Land Loss creates space for different layers of this shared experience to come through instead of conforming to one narrative. “Some residents held a quiet acceptance, and spoke of a deep connection to the natural cycles shaping their lives,” the photographer says. “Others felt frustrated at the reality of the situation, and couldn’t understand why more wasn’t being done to protect their homes. Everyone was facing the same fate, but viewing it from very different perspectives.”
Through spending time contemplating cliff life, Miechowski’s own perspective soon widened. “Time somehow felt more pronounced in this landscape, like it couldn’t be ignored,” he says. “Unlike the city, where time is often measured by progress and growth, the coast operates on a completely different scale. There, time is marked by the disappearance of things.” The geological process of erosion became a metaphor for the fleeting nature of everything—including our own lifecycle—leaving the photographer with a renewed sense of presence and appreciation for the shifting beauty around him.
