Visiting the seaside for relaxation, leisure and entertainment gained widespread popularity during the Victorian age, when expanding railway networks offered fast, increasingly affordable travel to beckoning coastal resorts. Just as holiday tourism was advancing, so the new portrait medium of photography was also evolving, with pioneering photographers launching commercial studios as early as the 1840s in developing seaside locations nationwide, from Brighton to Blackpool.

Victorian seaside studios
When photography reached a mass market in the 1860s with the convenient card-mounted carte de visite print, thousands of professional photographers established themselves at popular beach resorts, offering portraits to growing numbers of visitors arriving on Bank Holidays, for day excursions and longer holidays. Victorian tourists may have visited a seaside studio if, for instance, they were on their honeymoon or celebrating a special occasion during their sojourn, or simply in order to have a visual memento of their trip to the coast. Some studio photographers operated all year round, especially on the mainland and in major locations; others were seasonal, setting up temporarily in places like the Isle of Wight during the summer months.

Over time, many resort studio photographers developed their trade, vying for business by providing more appealing settings for their clients. Some installed picturesque painted backdrops evoking cliffs, the sea, a cove or even recognisable views of the seafront outside, complete with sweeping bay, pier or promenade. From the 1880s onwards, when photographic studio props in general became more authentic, seaside studios offered more diverse nautical themes, perhaps contrived caves and rock pools, or the deck of a boat with sails, ropes and rigging. Small children were given a bucket and spade or shrimping net to hold. There was an irony about the carefully contrived sets, for the sun shone and waves lapped outdoors, while seagulls could be heard beyond the window.

Beach photography
Natural open-air photographs were also available to beachgoers as early as the 1850s/1860s from outdoor practitioners who set up their cumbersome photographic and darkroom apparatus at strategic points along the shore. Many early beach photographers were itinerants using the collodion positive process that could create a finished photograph in minutes; thus they were able to offer inexpensive ‘while-you-wait’ portrait souvenirs to day trippers and holidaymakers – either glass collodion positive or ambrotype photographs, or images on enamelled iron called ferrotypes or, more popularly, tintypes. The production of cheap on-the-spot photographs portraying their subjects leaning against an upturned boat on the pebbles, or riding a donkey, earned beach photographers something of a poor reputation as vulgar showmen peddling cheap forms of entertainment, but they were convenient and popular with generations of ordinary people.

Seaside photographs presented as heavy framed or cased glass ambrotypes were very much a Victorian photographic format, obsolete by the 1890s. However metal tintype photographs enjoyed enduring popularity from the 1870s, when they first became fashionable in Britain, until the 1940s/50s in some areas. Later tintypes dovetailed with more modern beach photographs that expressed the bustle, gaiety and continuing lure of British holiday resorts in the days before affordable foreign package travel – the kinds of holiday pictures that many of us may find in our collections at home today.

Seaside postcards
Many surviving seaside photographs from the early to mid 20th century are postcards. Divided-back postcards, devised and first authorised for postal communication in 1902, began to be used for presenting portrait photos by professional photographers in the early 1900s. ‘Real photo postcards’ (as they were/are sometimes called) were well established by 1906–7 and remained fashionable until c.1950, their heyday the 1910s–1930s. Postcards are often described as the most ‘democratic’ form of photograph, being extraordinarily varied and portraying people from all walks of life, in both formal studio settings and natural outdoor locations.

As fashions changed and social conventions relaxed from the late Edwardian period onward, deckchairs appeared in postcard scenes and clients posed in more casual clothes – white linen skirts, loose flannel trousers and soft white plimsolls. Some seaside photographers made a point of offering humorous themes and gimmicks, reinforcing the holiday spirit: fake rowing boats, artificial beach donkeys and the vision of the subject’s head protruding through a hole in a cartoon figure, transforming them into a sailor or bathing belle.

Walking pictures
A type of holiday photograph that survives widely today is the street scene or ‘walking picture’ – a candid photograph of an individual, couple or small group of pedestrians snapped unawares as they strolled along the pavement, pier or esplanade. A feature of many busy towns, but especially common in holiday resorts, and called ‘walkies’ in the trade, these inimitable photographs captured their unsuspecting subjects literally in mid step, clutching cardigans, bags and newspapers as they headed to the beach, enjoyed the promenade or drifted back towards their lodgings for lunch.

This particular genre of seaside photography was the work of operators at coastal resorts the length and breadth of Britain, from Brighton to Bridlington, Littlehampton to Lowestoft, Margate to Morecambe. Some represented permanent local studios but many were employed as peripatetic or temporary seasonal operators by one of numerous popular photographic chains that arose between the wars – firms with many branches such as Sunny Snaps, Jerome or Wrates Happy Snaps. Positioning themselves at a strategic location where the public were sure to pass by, the photographer popped out with camera, snapped his/her subjects and presented a docket with negative number and details of the company’s kiosk so that they could, if wished, collect a print of their photograph later that afternoon or the next day.

The first ‘walking pictures’ date to c.1919 and they reached their height during the late 1920s to 1940s, although a minority were being produced as late as the 1960s/1970s, the last few using colour film. Many are postcards, but others are variable prints, some presented as a narrow strip of sequential images, like frames of a film. The excellent blog (also a book), Go Home on a Postcard is a wonderful source of information, with carefully recorded photographer/company data and evocative images with seaside architecture, cars and fashions to help with dating our own walking pictures: https://gohome onapostcard.wordpress.com/

Amateur snapshots
Stiff competition existed among professional seaside photographers. Some enjoyed long careers and were well known in their locality, but many businesses were fleeting, some not surviving the changes brought about by two world wars. Further challenges to the trade arose when automated coin-operated photo booths appeared in Britain in the late 1920s and with the gradual rise of the modern amateur photographer. Following the launch of the user-friendly Kodak Box Brownie camera in 1900, and other models of box and folding cameras, amateur photography advanced during the early 20th century, especially from the 1910s onwards. Many people acquired personal cameras between the wars and after the Second World War camera ownership was widespread, enabling individuals and families to take their own casual snaps as souvenirs of day trips and annual seaside holidays.

Everyday life was changing too: leisure time for the masses was increasing and geographical mobility advancing. There was so much more to photograph, to record. More of our forebears travelled about the country on weekends in charabancs, motor cars, on motorbikes or on bicycles and visited beaches, resorts and coastal beauty spots. Fashion also modernised, shifting to accommodate new pastimes and needs. By the 1930s, holiday and beach snapshots show our parents, grandparents and their parents letting their hair down, wearing loose summer frocks and sandals, skimpier swimwear and casual shorts and open-necked shirts.

By the 1960s the commercial beach photography that had been a familiar part of visiting the seaside for around a century was in permanent decline and would soon be little more than a nostalgic memory. However, old beach ambrotypes, tintypes and postcards – once considered inconsequential ephemera – are now, justifiably, appreciated for their aesthetic, technical and cultural merits, and unparalleled historical documentary value. {