Bronze atFirst Light

The alarm goes at quarter past three. The beach is empty, the sky has not decided what it wants to do yet, and somewhere down on the sand a bronze man is sitting on a stump, waiting. Fitting, as it goes. This year's sculpture is called The Long Wait.

I have made this walk four years running now. Same beach at Lowestoft, same ungodly hour, a different Laurence Edwards bronze each time. It was never meant to be a project. It just quietly became one.

A vast bronze thing bedded into the sand on the tide line, there at low water and gone again when the sea came back over it. Edwards talked about it being a barometer of the tide, and at six in the morning with the water pulling back off it, you could see exactly what he meant. I have photographed a lot of things on that beach. I had not photographed anything that seemed to be keeping an eye on the sea.

The year after came the five walking men.

They had been standing in the gardens of Blenheim Palace before someone had the good sense to put them on a Suffolk beach instead, walking along parallel to the water and looking back in at the town. Five figures mid-stride in an empty dawn does something to you. I stayed longer than I planned.

Shimmer and Borrowed Breath

Last year there were two more, Shimmer and Borrowed Breath, the surfaces worked so that the light seemed to go into them and come back out again. Which, if you are stood there at sunrise with a low sun coming straight off the North Sea, is a gift. You point the camera and the sculpture does half the work.

And this morning

A seated figure, head down, with two thin crooked sticks rising off the temples like horns. There is something of the brooder about it, an arm up near the face, the whole thing folded in on itself. It will sit there through the summer while the festival comes and goes around it.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. Edwards makes these to be read in changing light. The tide, the weather, the angle of the sun, even the moon. He builds the conditions in. So the daft early start is not me imposing a mood on the work. It is me turning up at the one hour the work was waiting for. The crowds get the sculptures in flat midday light. I get them when they are still doing the thing they were made to do.

Firstlight is a dawn festival, named for it, built around the solstice. I have been its photographer since the first one back in 2019. Most of the festival happens when everyone is awake. This bit happens when almost nobody is. Four years in, the bronze keeps changing and the alarm stays the same.