Category: Essays

There’s something wistful and bittersweet about these last few weeks of August. You can feel it in the weather, that turn from the heat of June and July to a crispness in the morning that reminds you that autumn isn’t far away. You can feel it in the receding hours of daylight in the evening and the later sunrises. You can see it in the trees, the colour of their leaves turning from young, fresh, vibrant green to a more weathered, crisper and tired darkness.

This time of year also reminds me that – despite our modern conveniences and technology – we are also still, when it comes down to it, animals in nature ourselves. As no doubt other animals do, we feel the end of summer. As their thoughts turn to preparing for the winter ahead, storing food, hibernation, our thoughts likewise shift to the season ahead: the return to school and the coming autumn.

I’ve often felt this time of year feels more like a time for reflection than perhaps New Year itself. For me, the end of the summer feels a more appropriate time to take stock of your life. Summer is the time of plenty, it’s the time when we live our lives to the full, when we feel our most social, when we make new connections, when we stay out late and have more energy, and when we go out and explore the world. And so the end of August and early September, as the summer frenzy begins to fade away, is perhaps the more natural time to think about our achievements, to be more reflective, to retrench and retreat into yourself.

Dallas Hartwig writes about this in his book: The 4 Season Solution. He describes a way of living that is more attuned to the seasons and the natural cycles of life, a way that our ancestors lived but that we have loss touch with in our modern world of ultra-convenience. We live in a perennial summer, where any food you could ever want is available year round. Our ancestors, he says, lived in a way that was more in touch with the natural seasons. They saw this time as “part of a restorative and self-balancing pattern of extraction and contraction”. They thought, he argued, the “As pleasant and exciting summer socialising was, winter’s quiet rootedness provided a healing time to reconnect with closer relationships, and to turn inwards to ourselves”.

As the end of summer approaches, this perspective resonates with me. I find myself reflecting on what new things I have experienced over the past few months, and the memories I have created. This includes how my photography has changed and developed over that period. As I was trawling through my Lightroom catalogue looking through the hundreds of pictures I had taken over the summer, there was one set I kept coming back to. These were photographs made when we were away on a family holiday in Cornwall back in July. Looking through the set for the third time I realised what kept drawing me back to them.

I use both digital and film for my photography here. I’ve written about this before; I think each medium has its merits and uses. But there was something about the feel of these Cornwall photographs that I kept coming back to. These were pictures taken on film, with my old Pentax KM. The film stock I had used – Kodak Pro-Image 100 – had given the images a timeless and slightly dreamy feel. The slightly saturated colour, the grain, the depth. The images had the feeling of a memory rather than a document.

The memories they evoked were a perfect reflection of how I was feeling about the end of summer – that bittersweet reminiscing signalling the passing of something. I’ll never have this summer again, and we’ll never have the exact same experience in Cornwall, even if we go there again. I’ve made peace with that. As I said earlier, this time of the year is the time when we should retreat into ourselves, roll back from the expansiveness of summer, and reflect on how we have changed and grown. And when I come back to look at these photographs in years to come, they will hold the feeling of those summer days as vividly as the memory itself.

I was reminded the other week that photography is often much better when it is uncomplicated, when you don’t overthink it, and when you just let yourself go with the flow.

I don’t think I’m unusual among those in the photography community in that I spend a lot of time reading about photography, looking at other people’s work and thinking about places to photograph. I’m constantly researching where I can go that will inspire me, or what locations I can visit to capture something new, unusual or different?

I know I’m also not alone when it comes to spending time thinking about photography equipment. What camera is best suited to the type of images I want to capture? What lens would be best for this photoshoot? Do I want to shoot this place on digital or on film? And then, more than often than not, I find myself down a YouTube rabbit hole researching kit, or film stock, or eBay prices.

You could of course take a view that this is all part of the photographic process, and will ultimately help me become a better photographer. The problem with all of this, however, is that it takes you away from the actual process of taking photographs – of creating.

As the writer Julia Cameron puts it in The Artist’s Way, “when a creative artist is fatigued, it is often from too much inflow, not too much outflow.” All that researching, watching and reading isn’t neutral – it’s taking the time and space I need to take photographs, filling up the same well I need to draw from to actually make something.

My wife – who is often much wiser than me on these matters – constantly reminds me that it is important that we spend more time creating than consuming.

Translated to my context – I should spend more time out making photographs than watching content about photography (or photography kit). Ironically this is also the message that I hear most often from one of the photographers I follow most closely on YouTube – Dan Milnor. He constantly reminds his viewers, in his slightly confrontational and deadpan way, that we won’t learn photography watching his videos on YouTube, the only way to learn it is to get out there and do it.

And when I hear that message I absolutely know that it’s right. Take for example, the pictures that I’ve shared with this post. These are of a quarry site that’s literally just over a mile from my house. I just picked up the camera and went. No effort to get there, no long journey, or meticulous planning. I can be there and photographing within 15 minutes of leaving my house.

Sevenoaks Quarry has loads of really great stuff to photograph that interests me. The aging conveyor belts and quarry machinery, an old and crumbling Oast House that sits in the middle of the processing machinery gradually being colonised by birds nests, the quarry pits themselves and the excavators sat around the periphery. And the best bit is there’s a public foot path that goes right through the middle of all of this so I don’t even feel I have to go out of my way or risk trespassing to access it.

Walking through the quarry on a warm summer’s evening with the sun low in the sky to the west, nobody else around, and my camera in hand, is just bliss. I have the place to myself. I can get lost in the process of framing a picture, thinking about how I can maximise the angle of the sun’s light to create interesting compositions with the old quarry machinery and the long shadows. As my confidence walking through the site grows, I challenge myself to be a little more adventurous and veer ever so slightly off the public right of way to see what interesting photographs might be waiting for me. I can feel myself thinking about the message I want to convey – these photographs as a record of an industrial place in decline (the quarry is due to close in a few years), an illustration – on a small scale – of how we extract resources and despoil the planet for our purposes.

In short, I am lost in the process of creating.

And all of this is right on my door step. It doesn’t require meticulous planning and loads of fancy kit. And if I compare how I feel when I’m out with my camera to how I feel when I’ve spent all evening on a screen, down a YouTube rabbit hole watching other people’s content there’s no contest. That’s not creating. I convince myself it’s part of the process but it’s not, it’s pseudo-creativity (coined from Cal Newport‘s term pseudo-productivity – how knowledge work has created a culture of endless meetings, emails and messaging as a proxy for real, meaningful work). Pseudo-creativity is spending all of your time watching, reading and talking about being creative as a proxy for deep, meaningful creation.

Sometimes the best experiences I’ve had as a photographer and when I’ve made my best pictures are when I haven’t spent too much time thinking about it, when I’ve resisted the urge to prevaricate about what kit to take out, when I’ve turned off the device, put down the book, and just gone out there and got on with it.

And so here’s my challenge to all of you reading this. If you looked honestly at how you spend your time on any given day or in any given week, what would be the balance of time you spend consuming rather than creating?

For me, when I’m out there with my camera, walking through the quarry or elsewhere, I know that is the only way I’m going to get better at my craft.

I must have crossed the Dartford Crossing hundreds of times in my life. I live in Kent, the rest of my family live in Essex; any family gathering or meet up usually involves a northbound passage through one of the two old Dartford tunnels, and a return to Kent via the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge.

It’s on the way back to Kent that the M25 crossing affords a spectacular view west along the Thames. If you time your journey home just right, you can often see the sun setting behind the distant skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and the City of London.

As attractive as that view can be, it’s the rather less conventionally attractive industrial spread that you can see on both sides of the motorway as you climb the span of QEII Bridge that has always interested me. A mix of oil tanks, cement works, freight jetties, and other manufacturing, distribution and storage facilities spill out from under the looming shadow of the QEII bridge, predominantly, but not exclusively, on the north side of the river.

And so, on a recent warm and balmy Sunday evening, I took a drive from home to walk along the riverside with my camera, intrigued about how close I could get to what I’ve observed from the motorway.

But first, I inevitably faced the queue of traffic to get through the northbound crossing. Fortunately this time it was only a ten minute delay, but we’ve often been stuck here for considerably longer – the inevitable delay that we always have to factor into a journey north of the river, a hazard of being separated from the rest of my family by the Thames as it begins to significantly widen, free from the confines of the city it flows through.

I have a vague childhood memory of these two tunnels being the only way you could cross the river here, before the QEII Bridge was built. I wonder to myself how long I may have waited here in traffic if these two tunnels had remained the only passage from Kent to Essex and back.

I drove onwards into Essex and immediately turned off the motorway towards the small settlement of Purfleet. Purfleet sits upstream from the Dartford Crossing, a few miles from the consumption-driven agglomeration of Lakeside, with its shopping mall, Ikea store, and countless retail parks, and abutting the Thames and the industrial detritus that hugs the river in this part of Essex.

Purfleet feels like a place that is somehow untethered from everything around it. Just a single village convenience shop serves its population (the other shop in the village now boarded up), the trains entering its station on their way to Central London do so across a level crossing, the kind of thing you find in the countryside, not in an urban area like this. This feels like a forgotten place, a place left behind by the metropolitan mega-city it sits on the outskirts of.

Walking across the level crossing, I follow a path onto some scrubland that separates the village’s main road from the Thames. Concrete blocks intersperse the path, emblazoned with the tags and graffiti of those that have come here before. I come across a makeshift shelter, with a rudimentary sofa and table nestling beneath, an empty packet of Marlboros on the table – evidence of life and subversion in this wasteland.

Walking a bit further and I come across an area where rubbish has been dumped, including an old fridge. This place feels marginal. There’s a sense of the badlands about it that fills me with a degree of unease. Is this a safe place to be walking as the evening light fades with an expensive camera in hand?

I push on through my anxiety towards the bank of the Thames itself. Not that I can see the river at this point. The embankment has a large flood wall all along the river here. This area is, after all, downstream from the Thames Barrier. Should a storm surge threaten the City, then the Barrier walls would be raised and, with nowhere else to go, the deluge would spill out of the river’s channel downstream threatening the shoreline in places like this.

Reaching the riverside, a sense of claustrophobia adds to my unease. The narrow path here is bordered by the high river wall on one side and barbed wire fencing on the other. The barbed wire separates the path from more scrubland, though at this point I am able to photograph the concrete footprints of previous buildings and industry remain, gradually being obscured by the relentless reclamation of nature.

I eventually reach the oil storage tankers of the Esso oil terminal. In the late evening sun they take on a luminescent rust colour, their faded and flaking paintwork giving them a tiger stripe makeover through my viewfinder. Pipes stream in all directions from the refinery and across the path I am on and out to a jetty that sticks out on the Thames. I climb up the ladders that periodically intersperse the flood wall to get a better view. I’m rewarded with a beautiful vista westward into the city as the sun lowers in the evening sky.

Looking along the riverside a number of jetties poke out into the path of the Thames. Some are abandoned and long since fallen out of use, a few still look like they are in use, including the one with a stream of pipes that reach across from the shoreline to the refinery.

I eventually work up the bravery to step onto one of the old abandoned jetties, this one more of a concrete quay (the wooden deck boards on some of the others look like they might give way under my weight). Just a few old abandoned huts sits on the plinth, each making perfect photographic silhouettes against the setting sun in the west. Inside each hut sits some kind of wheel connected to something that lies below my feet. I realise these must be how the flow in and through the abandoned pipework below must have been controlled.

Sat on the plinth there’s a strange silence to the scene. The QEII bridge looms downriver, but I’m too far away to hear the noise of the constant traffic it carries. The City looms in the other direction with the sun sinking lower on the horizon. There’s the odd sound of a seagull somewhere above me or across the river. But other than that the evening is perfectly still.

Sat on the quay, I can’t be seen from the river path. The river is too wide here for me to be seen from the opposite bank. For a moment I am invisible to the rest of the world. That thought stays in my mind as I climb back onto the river path and walk back to Purfleet, the invisible place sat on the outskirts of the mega-city.

Photography is an obsession. I’m sure it’s the same for me as it for many of you that read my posts who are also photographers. I’m nearly always thinking about photography, looking at the work of other photographers, spending far too much time on YouTube watching photography based content, or constantly looking around thinking about how what I am looking at would look through a viewfinder, captured and composed on a frame.

Most of the content I post on my website and in these newsletters and essays gravitates towards the serious. Photographs of our impact on the environment in which live, the cost of the energy that fuels our lives. I enjoy what my approach to photography brings me: a sense that I have something to say, a creative release, a sense of fulfilment. But every now and then it’s nice to just take the shackles off and enjoy photography for what it is – just lots of fun.

Going for our family summer holiday on the beautiful Ionian island of Lefkada in Greece provided the perfect opportunity to remember why I love photography so much in the first place.

For this trip I had invested in a digital point and shoot. I wanted to feel unburdened by lenses and SLR bodies and film choices. I took the plunge on a Panasonic Lumix DC-LX100 II before I travelled because I’d read good things about the digital sensor and the quality of the Leica Summilux zoom lens attached to the front of it.

I was not disappointed. I absolutely loved the sense of fun of having this little powerhouse in my pocket. It coped with nearly everything I asked it to do and having a zoom lens was surprisingly useful (my usual preference is usually for a prime).

But the most surprising thing for me about using this camera was that it reignited my love of colour photography. Most of the content on Frame to Grain and on my Substack has been black and white to this point. This is partly a factor of my preference for shooting film as opposed to digital, with black and white film and processing being cheaper than colour. But the little Lumix made me fall in love with colour all over again.

Of course, this is helped by the fact that Lefkada, like lots of Greek islands, just calls out for colour photography. The vibrancy of the colours, the saturation of the bright cloudless summer skies, and the hue of the Mediterranean colour palette would just not look the same in monochrome. But what was even more interesting to me was that the Lumix changed the way I was looking for compositions. I was looking for colour contrasts, looking for colour themes. In fact some of my recent Substack Note posts have been small series of pictures around a colour that has caught my eye on Lefkada.

The most surprising colour that caught my eye was the predominance of mint/pastel green (as well as lots of other colours) on many buildings in Lefkada Town. Typically we associate traditional Greek buildings with blue and white. It turns out that there is a specific reason that Lefkada Town is different – it sits in a major seismic zone, and a devastating 1825 earthquake (followed by more, including a big one in 1948 and 2015) forced a distinctive building method: stone masonry only on the ground floor, with light timber-frame upper storeys clad in corrugated sheet metal (since heavy upper floors would collapse and kill people). That sheet-metal cladding needs painting for weathering which is why the town looks so patchwork-colourful rather than uniform.

Whatever the reason it’s a colour photographer’s dream – lots of pastel colours everywhere. Will I continue to shoot in colour now I’m back from Greece? I’d certainly be more inclined to do so but that’s not actually the main thing I’ll take away from this trip.

Using the Lumix on Lefkada reminded me of how I first got into photography as a child. The pocketable point and shoot, combined with the nostalgic feel of long summer days abroad, reminded me of those family holidays we used to take when I was a kid. I was transported back to using a Kodak Instamatic 110-format camera – 24 exposures taken to Boots when I got home for processing or sent off to TruPrint or similar.

Photography back then was just something I did for fun. Using the Lumix reminded me that there is fun to be had in the simple act of looking around at what you see and pointing your lens at something just because it is interesting. No ulterior motive, no sense of having to say something. Just my eyes, colour everywhere, a camera that doesn’t get in the way, and good old summer holiday vibes!

I had come to Eryri to spend some time alone and recharge; to walk and to make photographs. I left a little more conscious of my place in the world than when I arrived.

I knew, as part of my trip, I wanted to spend some time around the now-decommissioned Trawsfynydd nuclear reactors. These twin Magnox reactors, constructed and operational from 1965, are unique in the UK in that they are the only nuclear reactors built in a national park. I wanted to explore how they had impacted the environment here, what relationship they had to the beauty that surrounds them.

Approaching the reactors for the first time, there was a familiarity to the brutalist concrete megastructures that loomed in the foreground of my car windscreen. They follow the same aesthetic as Sizewell A and Dungeness A, both reactors closer to home and that I have photographed before. Here though, there are two of them. A pair of concrete twins, birthed as slaves to our energy demands and now standing as fading monuments to our engineering hubris.

The reactors sit on the banks of a manmade lake – Llyn Trawsfynydd. The lake came decades before the reactors (flooded from 1924 to 1928), created by one of four dams that were built to serve the hydro-electric power station down the valley at Maentwrog. Viewed from just around the Llyn, the reactors actually settle neatly into the landscape, their huge scale somehow more manageable seen as reflections on the Llyn and against the huge mountain vistas of Snowdonia.

The next day I took a walk around the Llyn’s perimeter to get a greater sense of how they sit in the context in which I found them. The weather was kind on the days I was in Wales, but the skies still had a sense of potential menace in them. This only adds to the drama of the landscape, the sky somehow a mirror of the rugged and wild moorland and mountains around me.

As you walk around the lake you come to a dam. It was a strangely quiet scene. The scale of the dam is impressive but the low water levels in the Llyn meant that there was no sound of gushing water flowing down the valley towards the hydro-electric power station. The dam seemed suspended in time, its smooth concrete edifice on the downward side and majestic supporting arches a marvel of early twentieth century engineering.

The dam felt like a remnant from a previous age when hydro-electric power was thought to be the answer to our energy needs, yet the irony is that it has outlasted the nuclear reactors. They stopped producing electricity in 1993, and it is the revenue generated from the energy that the hydro-plant produces that is funding the decommissioning of the nuclear reactors.

As I walked further around the Llyn to Cwm Moch on the opposite bank to Trawsfynydd I found myself mulling over this strange quirk of fate – the old technology funding the clean up of the newer technology. And what a clean up operation it is. A public information board near the site informs you that 99.9% of the spent radioactive material has been recovered and stored in an intermediate waste store on site. The site is now in a care and maintenance phase. The waste will be moved if and when a national waste repository becomes available, with final site clearance expected towards the end of this century.

I let this timeline sit with me for a while. Thirty odd years of generation, over one hundred years of clean up. Compare that to the hydro-electric scheme that now funds the clean up – still going over a century after commissioning. No waste produced with a yet unspecified final home.

As I looked through my viewfinder across the large expanse of the Llyn, I asked myself what this landscape will look like when the twin concrete shells of the reactors are finally pulled down. Viewed from a distance there’s a majesty to the reactors. I felt a lingering sense of admiration for the beauty of the structures. They somehow feel more at peace with their surroundings here than the other reactors I have visited. The electricity pylons that funnel out from them in neat parallel lines across the mountains don’t feel as obtrusive as I thought they would.

Putting down the camera and just pausing to take it all in I felt reinvigorated. Eryri stirs your soul. When you are in a place as beautiful and epic as this you cannot help but be awestruck. The space, the scenery, the mountains, the air remind you that the first world problems of our daily grind are insignificant in the sweep of human history and especially in the grand scale of geological time. Our everyday stresses and anxieties, our selfish ruminations and preoccupations with ourselves all feel irrelevant. You realise how small you are.

And maybe that’s why the reactors, the dam, the pylons – which should all feel alien in this stunning landscape – somehow don’t feel out of place. It’s a scale thing. These structures are swallowed up by what surrounds them. They are present but not dominant. They don’t feel out of place because, just like me, they are insignificant.

Yes, it will take the rest of this century to remove the last remnants of the reactors. But the mountains were here for millions of years before they were built, and they will be here for millions of years after they have gone. Sat on the side of Cwm Moch looking across the Llyn at Trawsfynydd A and B, that was a deeply comforting thought.

One sunny Saturday morning a few weeks ago I found myself driving towards the east Kent coast to visit Cleve Hill Solar Park which claims to be the largest solar farm in the UK. As I drove the hour or so to the coast I wondered to myself what I would find. Would the scale take my breath away? Would I feel hopeful that here – on some low-lying marsh land in the Garden of England – I was seeing tangible evidence of our energy transition, of our gradual but accelerating move away from dependence on fossil fuels?

However, as it turned out the experience left me a little frustrated and more than a little underwhelmed.

Cleve Hill was not that easy to find. Unlike the huge looming presence of the nuclear reactors I’d previously visited at Sizewell or Dungeness, you cannot see a solar panel field from a big distance on low lying flat land. Furthermore, they tend to have been developed on what was previously private farmland in pretty rural places so require a little bit of persistence to find. My reliance on Apple Maps inevitably took me to a dead end single track lane. A bit of cursing and three point turning later, I eventually retraced my way back down the dead end road and decided to head out to the coastline as I knew there was a footpath along the seafront that separated the solar panel farm from the sea wall.

Parking by the coastal path I headed out on foot. It was simply the most beautiful still spring morning possible. The sea – strictly speaking The Swale which separates The Isle of Sheppey from mainland Kent – was retreating at low tide but you wouldn’t know it. The surface was like a mill pond such that any tidal retreat felt like it must have been taking place by osmosis rather than the motion of the water itself. A very light spectral haze floated across the surface. Looking out south over the sea wall I could just about make out the Kentish Flats Wind Farm at the point where the haze of the sea horizon melted into the haze of the early morning sky. My only company was the excited morning chatter of various estuary birds announcing to anyone that would listen what a beautiful, glorious morning it was to be alive.

Eventually as I walked along the path I could see the solar farm on the horizon. Getting closer, the panels began to take on an ethereal luminescence all of their own as they reflected the glow of the early morning sun, sucking in its energy. Closer still and I began to see the regimental rows stretching away from the coast, their uniformity on the horizon only punctuated by the emergence of an electricity carrying pylon or two, transporting the precious energy created on the farm out and onto the grid, a small stream helping to quench the thirst of our never-ending demand for energy.

Cleve Hill produces 373 megawatts of electricity, that’s enough clean fuel to power just over 100,000 homes. It covers a piece of land about the size of a small English market town – think Ludlow or Ely. It is the UK’s largest solar farm and, as a result, has been designated a nationally significant infrastructure project.

However, whilst the scale feels undoubtedly impressive, the lack of a natural vantage point means it is not that easy to capture through a camera lens. Furthermore, there’s another issue – it’s simply not that easy to get that close to the panels themselves. The site – privately owned – is fenced off with lots of signs warning about danger of death from high voltage equipment punctuating the perimeter fence.

Nevertheless, you are able to get just about close enough to understand the size of each of these solar panels. You could comfortably pass underneath one at the point at which one of its edges reaches up towards the sky. Each panel is the size of the roof on a typical semi-detached house. I could imagine walking under the array to feel not unlike how it would feel to walk along a street but passing from home to home through each house’s eaves.

However, my overwhelming feeling at this point of the visit was one of frustration – at how difficult they were to find, and that I couldn’t get close enough or get a decent enough vantage point to really understand what you were looking at, to really understand and capture through my lens the impact this undoubtedly huge site has on the place in which it is located.

Despite its proximity to the tidal marshes of The Swale – a site of special scientific interest because of the diversity of wildlife to be found there, the site felt strangely sterile. There were no birds and insects darting around the panels, no wild flowers to be seen on the grass that carpets the ground beneath the panels, no sound of bees buzzing around doing their thing. In fact it felt slightly eerie and quiet – so much so that maybe I imagined that the panels themselves were emitting a background hum as they hoovered up the Sun’s boundless energy.

I couldn’t help but contrast how this site felt compared to what I’d found in the area surrounding Dungeness power reactors, an RSPB reserve, teeming with water birds and those that use the reserve as a stopover on their migrations.

And this is one of the trade-offs we will have to negotiate. Solar farms will need to be developed on a monumental scale for the UK to fully transition away from carbon. By one estimate we’d need about 280 Cleve Hills to fully replace fossil fuels in our energy mix (that’s before you start accounting for the seasonal variation in output of solar and the energy storage conundrum).

Covering swathes of the country in these shiny, silicon panels may well come at the expense of wildlife and some of our precious ecosystems and habitats. To be fair to the developers of this site they have worked with the Kent Wildlife Trust to think about how biodiversity can be encouraged back to the site after construction has finished. Perhaps if I came back here in a few years it would feel different.

As I walked further along the periphery of the site, I found myself contemplating what this solar farm represented. Was this a glimpse into the future, a future where large chunks of our open space are covered in shiny, luminescent photovoltaic cells (or of course large wind power turbines)? And yet, unlike nuclear generators or wind farms, there is no brutalist architecture that forces you to admire or be repulsed, there are no majestic blades that demand you take a position on how a field of turbines destroy or complement a view. The solar farm is just there in its uniform neatness, present and producing, but somehow sterile and slightly soulless.

I realise this is entirely a photographer’s view of the world. I’m perhaps more selfishly interested in aesthetics and the feel of a place than its purpose. But I was struck by an irony as I walked back to the car. Dungeness, a nuclear power station — perhaps the most feared and contested form of energy generation we have — sits at the heart of one of the most biodiverse nature reserves in the UK. Cleve Hill, a solar farm, sits beside a wildlife sanctuary yet feels sterile and lifeless. We are building this future to save our planet. But how natural it will feel when we get there is another question.

I came back to Sizewell because I felt the first visit had left something unresolved — not in the essay, but in me. A few days alone in Suffolk with a camera and my dog Lexie. I wanted to see what I’d missed.

As I approached Sizewell, driving through a landscape of red and white traffic cones, bare and scarred earth, heavy machinery and portakabins, the sense of destruction was still as palpable on this visit as it was previously.

Arriving at Sizewell Beach – the seafront onto which the nuclear reactors face, was, however, a slightly different experience. On the seaward side of the power station, save for a platform visible a few hundred meters out to sea, the impact of the construction work was much less tangible. The local cafe selling tea, cake and bacon butties was still very much in business. The car park had a splattering of empty cars, their owners out exercising their dogs on the beach.

Walking along the beach from the car park, I was surprised by just how close to Sizewell A and B you could get. Standing some 30 yards away from it, its concrete scale obscuring the Sun’s low trajectory in the early spring sky takes the breath away. Standing in its shadow is a visceral reminder of how small our footprint is as individuals, and yet how big our collective impact has been on the world we live in. Sizewell A is an old magnox type reactor that stopped producing power some 20 years ago yet still dominates the landscape for miles around.

Sizewell B is a more modern pressurised water reactor and is currently due to continue generating power until 2035. The B reactor is a different beast altogether. It looks like a giant golf ball, its sparkling white exterior almost luminescent in certain light. The reactor’s domed peak sits on top of a rectangle steel clad box, which has an uncanny resemblance to those monolithic distribution centres you often see just off motorway junctions.

But of course these two reactors are not the only story. Walk a little further north and you quickly encounter the main construction area for Sizewell C itself. The footprint of the construction work is easily two times the footprint of the current reactors put together. The perimeter fence is not easy to peer through, but you do nevertheless get a sense of the just how much man and machinery power is needed to construct a new nuclear reactor (or at least the type of new reactors we have chosen to commission here at Sizewell and at Hinckley Point in Somerset). The scale of the endeavour is undoubtedly huge.

That scale is not easily captured through the lens of a camera and as I stared through my viewfinder trying to find an angle that would do it justice I was also left with a feeling of apprehension. When Sizewell C is finished what will its size be compared to the current reactors? A and B already dominate the relatively flat local landscape. The new reactor will undoubtedly be much bigger – how will it feel to walk through the otherwise tranquil local woodland and marshland, or along the beach in its shadow?

The next day I took a different walk out to the coast hoping to get a sense of how the reactors fit into the broader landscape. I found myself arriving at the ruins of the old Leiston Abbey. The old abbey sits at the edge of Minsmere Marsh – a site of special scientific interest due to its unique and fragile coastal marshland environment and an RSPB reserve that is home to a number of endangered species.

The old Abbey was originally only accessible by a causeway and surrounded by marshland and tidal waters. It originally stood as an island, isolated from the nearby communities of Sizewell and Dunwich. Those villages were much bigger in medieval times and much of them has been lost to coastal erosion (Dunwich was a thriving port town until the 14th century when much of the harbour was lost in a storm surge). The abbey itself had to move inland due to frequent storm surges and flooding. In fact, coastal erosion is very much still a fact of life on this coast; take a walk a bit further south along the coast at Thorpeness and you will see homes now abandoned precariously balanced on fast eroding cliffs.

Circling the abbey’s ruined walls it still feels like you are somewhat isolated from the world around you. You can see how, in the 14th century, this would have been a peaceful and reflective space for the order that lived here. However, in the 21st century that feeling of isolation is rudely interrupted by the bright white dome of Sizewell B, looming menacingly in the distance along the coast. I wondered how much more visible and imposing Sizewell C would be in this vista, how it would alter the sense of peace I was still able to found in the shadow of the abbey ruins.

The juxtaposition of an old, abandoned place of worship, its ruins gradually fading back into nature, and the reactors in the distance was jarring. The old abbey served a commitment to faith and a higher purpose. The reactors serve our belief in engineering and the generation of the power it takes to serve our modern religion of consumption.

The viewfinder has a strange way of focusing your mind. The focus it brings sharpens your understanding of what you are seeing and the context in which you find it. As I framed the ruined abbey with the reactors in the background I was asking myself if there was a lesson here amongst the ruined abbey and neighbouring villages that have been slowly eaten away by the encroaching sea.

Our engineering and technological hubris makes us feel all powerful. We have built these reactors and are building a new one right up against a fast-eroding coastline. Were the old ruins here and the lost houses and villages along the coast a warning that, no matter how omnipotent we think we are, no matter how much we think we can control the world around us, nature will always prevail?

Those of you who have followed Frame to Grain for a while will know that I’ve increasingly focused my writing and photography on the infrastructure that we have constructed to supply our energy needs, and on our culture of consumption. This shift has been deliberate. The older I get the more I find myself asking questions about the impact that I as an individual, and we as a society, are having on the world that we live in.

When I am out making pictures for Frame to Grain I am conscious that each time I look through my camera lens to capture a picture I am looking at a single and unique moment in time. This moment will never occur again, nobody will ever find the scene I am framing in my viewfinder exactly the same way as I find it at that moment. The uniqueness of that moment brings a certain degree of power and responsibility to me as a photographer. I have the ability to shape the story the viewer experiences by what I decide to frame through my lens. But framing is always an act of exclusion as well as inclusion. What I decide to leave out of the frame is just as important to the story I create as what I decide to include.

As my interest in sustainability has grown I’ve begun to realise that the stories we are told about climate change work the same way. They are composed images, not neutral perspectives. Certain data is captured within the frame, certain data, where it doesn’t support the narrative sought, is cropped out.

I recently read the excellent book Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie. It’s a great read about the actual science and fact behind the stories we are told about environmental sustainability and climate change. Ritchie is the Deputy Editor at Our World in Data, a highly influential online platform that brings together data and research on the world’s biggest challenges and makes it accessible for a general audience.

Ritchie’s book brings a clarity and energy to the headlines we are often bombarded with about climate change and other sustainability matters. Her work helped me better understand what has been left out of the frame, what has been cropped. And it turns out that everything is not as bad or as clear cut as you might think.

For example, we are told that emissions that cause climate change are accelerating. However, here’s what has been cropped out of the frame: our emissions per capita reached a peak in 2012 and have been slowly falling ever since. On an individual basis we now emit much less carbon than our parents or grandparents did, despite the myth that they lived much less energy intensive and frugal lives. In fact, in the UK each of us now emits about as much as somebody in the 1850s yet the energy efficient technology we now have access to enables us to have an immeasurably better standard of life.

Of course that’s not all of the story. Even though the world has reached and passed peak birth rates (I was surprised to learn that we passed that point in 2017), the lag whilst those children grow up and live their lives means that the planet will not reach peak population size until the 2080s. That population growth means that even though emissions per capita are falling, gross worldwide emissions are still rising.

What about on a more micro scale? We are told that we should eat organic food locally grown, or at the very least grown in the UK. But again, the dominant narrative has cropped some inconvenient data out of the frame.

What the data actually tells us is that the transport element of our food chain only contributes about 5% of the total emissions caused by food production. And in fact most of that 5% comes from the emissions caused by lorry transport within a country ie. not the shipping itself (food that is sent by air has a different emissions profile). The rest of the emissions caused by food production come from land use change and emissions on the farm itself and, if you are trying to grow produce that is not native to the country in which you live – for example, trying to grow bananas in the UK, those emissions will be much higher.

What about the myth that we don’t produce enough food to feed everyone in the world? Again, cropped. We actually produce enough to feed everyone alive today twice the daily recommended intake of calories.

Ritchie is very keen to point out that this slightly more positive story is certainly not an excuse to stop doing the things we need to do to slow down climate change and environmental destruction. The consequences of not doing so will still be catastrophic. We feel and see this in our changing weather patterns, the plastic and litter washed up along the beaches that we stroll along, the latest headline we read about this or that species being in danger, the wild fire devastation we see in our news feeds.

Frame to Grain is my attempt to compose honestly, to tell a story about the places I visit as I find them, to share with you what confirms but also what confounds or complicates the narratives we are told about our impact on the world.

You will hopefully already have seen that what I see through my viewfinder sometimes triggers unexpected emotions in me – awe when I stood in the shadow of a nuclear reactor, or hope when I surveyed tens of thousands of shipping containers.

There are no easy answers to many of the existential questions that I’ve been asking myself about climate change, our impact on the environment, the sustainability of the lives we all live, the footprint we leave behind. But the more I see, and the more I read, I realise that everything is not always as you first think. The frame we see is not always the whole story.

Look carefully at the small print of nearly anything you own or consume and you will find it was made somewhere on the far side of the world — Taiwan or China for electronics, Bangladesh or Turkey for clothes, Brazil or Colombia for the coffee in your cup. We all know we are part of a world economy, that very little we buy today is made in this country. But knowing that and truly grasping the physical scale of what it means are two very different things.

It is only when I was up relatively close to the thousands of brightly coloured and stacked shipping containers, organised in neat rows, stretching in some cases as far as the eye can see, that you begin to realise the infrastructure that is required to keep our insatiable demand for cheap goods sated.

The Port of Felixstowe, where the Orwell meets the sea on the Suffolk coast, is the UK’s largest container port — handling nearly half of Britain’s entire containerised trade. Its scale takes the breath away. Its 29 ship-to-shore gantry cranes, some reaching close to 50 metres above the quayside, dominate the local skyline for miles around, and at any one time the port has capacity to hold 152,000 containers stacked across its yards.

There’s a neatness and careful organisation to the stacked shipping containers that I see through my lens as a peer through the barbed wire fence that marks the perimeter of the port. This organisation is necessitated by the incredibly complex and precise logistics that make sure the cargo in each 12m by 2.4m steel box arrives exactly where we want it at the time we need it.

Looking at each box, you cannot help but ask yourself what sits within? Where did it come from or what language were the makers speaking as they crafted or manufactured the cargo that it holds? Whose homes will the products it holds end up in, will they be able to contemplate the complex logistical operation that delivered their new toaster, their garden table, or their shiny new shoes to their homes?

Photographed from a distance, there’s an almost toy-like aesthetic to the scene. Each colourful shipping container looks just like one of those 4 x 2 lego bricks that were the mainstay of any significant construction you made as a child. But then the dark grey of the cranes punctuates your childhood reminiscing, and reminds you that this scene conveys anything but child-like innocence.

Each one of these boxes is a testament to consumption. The path that it took across the oceans of the world in the hull of a mega container ship is part of a chain of consumption that ties each of us to the world’s insatiable demand for resources. Each box represents an admission that we have built our lives around wanting and needing more stuff. You could argue whether this is a “need” created by corporate avarice rather than our own intrinsic desires, but we click on the buy button regardless, starting a chain of events that will ultimately end up in one of these boxes finding its way across the world to a harbour side such as Felixstowe.

Of course that’s not the end of the story. These containers are then loaded onto a lorry or occasionally a freight train for onward transport to a distribution centre somewhere across the country. For those of us worried about our carbon footprint, I was surprised to learn that it was this part of the journey, tethered to the back of a HGV, that is the most carbon intensive of the container’s journey, a surprising fact when you consider that some of these boxes have travelled thousands of miles from the other side of the world.

But once they are tethered to a HGV, the scale of the container shipping infrastructure we rely on so much is somehow lost as the lorries disperse across our trunk roads and motorways. It is here at a port like Felixstowe that you really feel the immense scale of the corporate consumption cycle that we are all a part of.

I must admit I expected to feel a degree of despair when I came to visit the port. I expected that I would feel shamed by what these thousands of shipping containers represented. I expected they would stir feelings of helplessness about the impact that our consumption culture is having on the planet.

But instead I found myself surveying the scene through my camera lens with a feeling of awe and optimism. The lives we lead in different parts of the world are all interconnected, now more than ever. Every box captured in the viewfinder was a testament to our ability to cooperate together on a global scale. In today’s uncertain world that feels like something worth holding onto.

I can’t be the only one who finds themselves close to a nuclear power station and feels an underlying sense of unease.

As I drove towards Dungeness on the south coast of Kent on a day filled with the optimism of early spring sunshine, the silhouette of the nuclear power generators rose in the foreground of my windscreen. With each mile closer I drove their foreboding presence gradually took up more of my field of view.

Like many of a certain generation, I grew up with the spectre of the Chernobyl disaster in my consciousness. A catastrophic nuclear accident that left many dead, the health of many impacted for decades afterwards, an area the size of Greater London devastated and placed under permanent exclusion, uninhabitable to this day.

And then there was Fukushima in Japan in 2011, a nuclear accident caused not by man’s error and a faulty design (as was largely the case with Chernobyl), but by a catastrophic earthquake and subsequent tsunami, one of the largest Japan has ever seen.

These accidents are rightly emblazoned on our collective consciousness and feed a narrative which suggest nuclear energy is not safe.

But like so much of what we’ve come to believe in the climate and energy debate, as I was walking around the now decommissioned nuclear power station with my camera, I found myself asking what was the reality and what is myth.

The statistics, when you look at them properly, are striking. According to Our World in Data, coal causes around 25 deaths per terawatt-hour of electricity produced — the majority from air pollution rather than accidents. Nuclear causes 0.03 deaths per terawatt-hour. Even wind energy, which most of us instinctively feel comfortable with, causes slightly more deaths per unit of electricity than nuclear — from turbine accidents and offshore incidents. Nuclear results in 99.8% fewer deaths than coal. The accidents we carry in our collective memory — Chernobyl, Fukushima — are real and their consequences serious. But they are, statistically, anomalies in a safety record that no fossil fuel can come close to matching.

Perhaps the unease that we feel about nuclear is – when looked at rationally – unfounded. But as I spent some time walking around the now decommissioned nuclear reactors, I wondered if there was something else underpinning the unease.

These generators are enormous. Dungeness A and B are imposing, brutalist concrete megaliths. They utterly dominate the flat marsh and scrubland on which they are situated. For miles around, every glance that remotely looks in their direction is immediately rudely interrupted by their presence.

They feel like a backdrop to a dystopian sci-fi film, their 1960’s aesthetic like something you could almost feel described in an Asimov novel.

But spend a bit of time with them and you come to appreciate that they are also beautiful in their own way. Their clean concrete lines speak to the wonders of engineering that lie within. Their sheer scale leave you awestruck at the technological achievements they house. They are monuments to our mastery of the atom – the very building block of the universe.

The tension between our unease about nuclear, and the admiration you cannot help but have for the engineering and architectural achievement, are mirrored in the juxtaposition of these enormous reactors and the landscape in which they are situated.

It is this tension and how landscapes like this make us feel that is at the heart of what interests me as a photographer.

Dungeness has an end of the world feel to it. The large expanse of scrub (technically Britain’s only desert) which reaches back from the shingle beach is punctuated by wooden shacks, the odd marooned boat that now feels impossible far from the sea, and long forgotten remnants of the fishing industry.

There’s a palpable sense of the alternative to the the dwellings you come across, each home here cobbled together, in the shadow of the reactors, almost as a statement of quiet defiance. As I see someone’s washing fluttering in the wind I ask myself how I would feel living in the shadow of a nuclear reactor

Walking the fenced perimeter across the lunar-esque landscape that surrounds Dungeness A and B, you feel a strong sense both of how much we have achieved in the name of science and progress, but also how much that progress has impacted our environment.

The high fencing and warning signs that surround the site feel almost futile. These monoliths impose themselves on everyone and everything that surrounds them. Yet photographing the reactors from a distance and through barbed wire fencing contributes to a feeling that these edifices are somehow not for us or of our time. And that, of course, is true.

Both reactors are now decommissioned. They are a relic of a different time. They generated electricity for nearly 60 years between them. Some estimate that it will take nearly 100 years for the site to be returned back to its original pre-construction state (although there is some talk of building a new reactor on the same site).

100 years is a long time. What does that say about the care we have for our environment when it will take nearly twice as long to erase the scars of our progress as it did for these generators to be useful to us?

What world will this space form part of in 100 years time? Where will our desire for ever more stuff and ever more energy to power our stuff take us? What evidence will remain on this remote bit of scrubland of man’s ability to split a heavy uranium atom to power our lives?