what is alphabet coast?

Paul has always photographed the details whether as part of landscape or interior shoots or even when commissioned to photograph tattoos for a major show at Bournemouth's Russell Cotes Art Gallery & Museum. He also spent a lot of time at art college producing work that was heavily dependent on word play, using text within paintings, prints or photographs to change the context of the image.

A few years back he took a logical step and started photographing letters and numbers with the idea of putting them together into word-based images. As a photographer everything he does also has a set of rules and boundaries. This particular set of photographs is all taken within short reach of the sea, initially all in Swanage and along the Purbeck coast and more recently moving out along the Jurassic Coast in the south of England.

The concept for the images is that they all use letters, symbols and textures found in coastal areas. Always armed with a camera Paul spends most of his time while out and about stopping to photograph weathered and battered letters on all kinds of surfaces.

Paul can often be found scouring coastal cottages, rural retreats and splendid signposts for interesting textures, fonts and colours ready to be recycled into the words and pictures that make up this Alphabet Coast collection - if you're ever in Swanage, see if you can spot where some of them came from!