LOVE BITES by Tim Richmond

Description:

Tim Richmond2032

Richmonds elegiac, sombre ode to a coastal stretch of the Bristol Channel poetically weaves together lives hit by decades of austerity, food poverty and isolation.

Along this twenty-mile stretch of one of the world's longest coastal mudflats, Richmonds Love Bites encounters those attempting to find meaning and pleasure within an unforgiving environment. Beneath everyday photographs of food banks, punks, pleasure arcades, swingers clubs, shelters and new-build houses, Love Bites finds a waning unease to his subjects, a listless microcosm of post-austerity, post-Brexit Britain. Richmond allows these tensions to simmer on the surface: food poverty, isolation, commercial decline, housing precarity, homelessness, unfulfilled desire and longing mingle in the overcast, wide skies of the channel and its flat, sprawling coastline.

Continuing in a long line of British photographers that weave poetry and lyricism into social documentary projects, Richmond uses a delicate colour palette and sympathetic lens to capture the everyday realities of isolation and desire in this corner of Southwest England.