Category: Essays

We live in a world where photography is disposable. We each carry an incredibly powerful camera in our pockets. We’re bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of images daily. I – like I’m sure many of you – scroll past beautiful images posted online without giving them a second thought, swiping onwards past a photograph in a few seconds that, twenty years ago, you might have spent considerable time looking at and engaging deeply with.

What does it mean to consider yourself a photographer in this age of image saturation? What does making a photograph mean in an age when a huge bank of servers somewhere in a desert in California can create an image that some photographers would have worked for years to achieve?

The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve come to realise that – for me – if photography is going to mean something today, it has to come from a place where I have thought deeply about the subject I am photographing and where I feel there is a story I want to convey to the viewer. That is why much of the time when I am thinking about my photography, I am thinking about it in the context of longer term project work where there is a theme I want to explore, or a story I feel I want to tell.

Frequent readers of Frame to Grain will know that one of the themes that I explore with my photography is that of our energy consumption, looking at the environmental impact of our insatiable demand for electricity generation. But there is another theme and story that also interests me – those communities that live on the edge of Greater London in places that feel both proximate to everything the megacity has to offer, but also somehow marginal and detached from the cosmopolitan elite and wealth that dominate it.

It was this interest that took me to Long Reach on the Kent side of the Thames at the Dartford Crossing, on the opposite bank to Purfleet, a place I have already written about in my piece Invisible.

Long Reach is a place sufficiently remote from the rest of the population of London that it used to be the site of an isolation hospital that housed people with small pox. Today the hospital has gone, most of the land redeveloped, but this still feels like a place isolated from the rest of the urban sprawl around it.

The area is now the home to the community that occupy the Long Reach housing estate, their only company in this part of the Thames’ flood plain, a number of huge warehouse distribution centres given the area’s proximity to the M25, marshland, and the Long Reach sewage works, one of the biggest in the Greater London area and further evidence of the area’s isolation from the rest of the population.

Reaching the riverside from the housing estate takes you alongside the sewage works, barbed wire fences separating the path from the sewage tanks – though who in their right mind would want to stray any closer to the tanks I’m not sure. But the seagulls don’t seem to mind the tanks and I photograph them swarming above and I notice a few of them resting on the water of the tanks.

When you reach the river you are presented with a broad view of the river, over 200 metres wide at this point, looking across to the petrol storage tanks on the opposite side. Looking downstream, the QE2 bridge looms in the distance, its majestic sweep across the river carrying the endless streams of traffic circumventing the capital.

I walk upstream and continue along the edge of the sewage works. Graffiti adorns the walls and fencing separating the river path from the works. I’m greeted by a rather jovial “howdy” that, rather ironically, sits against the backdrop of the sewage outfall warning sign. Turning back inland and up the flood banks I come across a graveyard of motorcycles, three of them burnt out and left in a small corner of the wasteland that surrounds me. Burnt out and down to their metallic shells, there is the feeling of skeletons about them that causes me to approach them with caution. It feels like I have stumbled on the remains of something that was once alive.

Walking back towards the housing estate taking a long, straight path that cuts across the marsh land and towards the site of the old hospital, I come across a gate that was clearly put there to prevent motorcycles etc progressing any further from the housing estate towards the river. Obviously, the remains I’ve just photographed prove that this ambition was not quite accomplished. However, I can’t help but notice the graffiti of a Union Jack and bulldog on one of the nearby fence posts, and I wonder about the politics of this community which feels somehow marginalised from the metropolitan elite a few miles upstream.

That thought sits with me as I finish my walk passing a playground and playing field that has the Dartford Crossing as its backdrop. Looking at the kids playing in the playground I wonder what they feel about where they live. Do they appreciate their relative isolation from the rest of Greater London? What social conditioning will influence their development and life opportunities?

These are questions that arise from intentional observation, from moving through a place and noticing how details accumulate into meaning. A bank of servers could generate these images, but not the feeling and understanding that connects a burnt motorcycle, Union Jack graffiti, and a playground into a question about futures shaped by marginalisation.

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.