Love Bites

Richmond’s elegiac, sombre ode to a coastal stretch of the Bristol Channel poetically weaves together lives hit by decades of austerity and isolation.

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

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