Still Life With Chips and Graffiti
- Rory Wilmer
- Jul 16
- 2 min read
There’s a certain absurdity to being a photographer in New Brighton. You don't take photos—you inherit them.
Every shutter click risks reanimating Parr’s ghost, stitched into the concrete, caught in every seagull wing and chip wrapper. His lens flattened the town into folklore. Mine tries to let it breathe.
I walk these same streets, camera in hand, always in his wake but never quite in step. Where he found stillness in chaos—children melting into sugar and suncream, pensioners stoic beneath rotting shelters—I look for what moved on. The untold, the unspectacular. The awkward gaps between his frames.
What I capture isn’t nostalgia. It’s the afterimage. A mobility scooter humming past a graffitied lamppost. Three kids riding one bike under the gaze of a forgotten war memorial. Metal detectorists tracing lost histories in the sand.
A wooden ghost ship built from tidewreck and stubbornness. This isn’t Parr’s Britain frozen in time—it’s what blinked after the flashbulb went off.
Martin documented. I haunt.
Sometimes I think New Brighton only exists through the lens. Remove the frame and it fades like a discarded postcard. But if it must live in images, let them be new ones. Let them bend, blur, breathe. I’ll never outrun Parr. But maybe, just maybe, I can out-dream him.
Because what Parr never really caught was motion. His world is always waiting—for chips, for rain, for the next punchline. Mine’s already halfway down the prom, coat flapping, camera swinging.
The scooter rider in a Nike cap isn’t just a still life—he’s on his way somewhere, carrier bag rattling with stories. The graffiti on the lamppost doesn’t pose, doesn’t care. It just mutters something obscene and keeps walking.
Even the cruise liners have become part of the local theatre now—absurdly large and strangely intimate, looming like floating tower blocks while pensioners eye them from benches and dog walkers plot detours. The scale feels ridiculous, like a prank someone played on the horizon. But it’s all part of the charm.
New Brighton as a stage where the background always threatens to upstage the actors. It’s a place where theatre spills into the sea and you can’t tell if you’re in a postcard or a punchline.
I’ve been photographing this town for over twenty years. These are just a handful of moments—fragments, really. Maybe one day I’ll stitch them together into a book of my own. Something between a love letter and a witness statement.
RW
All photographs © Rory Wilmer. All rights reserved. Please do not use or reproduce without permission.
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