Into the Night: The Penlee Lifeboat Disaster

Marking 40 years since the Penlee Lifeboat tragedy, when 8 crew of lifeboat Solomon Browne were lost attempting to rescue the crew and passengers onboard a stricken coaster off the Cornish Atlantic coast, longterm collaborators Original Online created a unique live, online performance that is now streaming, to remember the crew’s courage, dedication and heroism.

My commission was to capture a group shot of the cast, together with solo portraits. The piece is a hopeful and stirring account of tragedy that celebrates heroism, but given the proximity to real-world events, with actors playing people whose lives were lost, I wanted to shoot images that had some of the sincerity of documentary portraits.

Leaning on Jack Lowe’s beautiful The LifeBoat Project – in which he shoots present-day crews with a plate glass collodion wet plate camera to lend modern images an unearthly timelessness – I designed a ‘slow photography’ approach, that used a canvas sail-like backdrop from Hapaca, lighting to hint at early dawn, and the Phase One IQ4 150MP set up with top-down viewfinder and a shutter release cable.

We asked the actors not to perform or model so much as to ‘be’, then I waited and shot as few as 10-12 images for each person.

It’s many more than the 1 shot you’d take on a plate camera, but as a process it created shots that – individually and as a set – are distinct from normal press portraits. With a very careful edit to enhance the super-shallow depth of field and texture captured in camera, the set was complete.