Cornwall

One of the greatest influencing factors on my photography is unquestionably the landscape of Cornwall. The variations are astounding; mining scrubland to dense woodland, the dramatic cliffs of the north coast to the lulling waters of the Helford River. This intense relationship with the topography of our little peninsula is hard to shake off once one has experienced it, which leaves many pilgrims traversing the well-beaten, and sometimes the unknown paths of Cornwall. Personally this love of my land is twanged with a discordant note. It is hard to live here. There are very few skilled job opportunities and the ones that are still leave the employed person 40% below the EU-27 GDP average for the rest of the UK. Private sector rent is disproportionally high as are house prices, driven up by the large number of second homes. This situation is only worsening as the population of Cornwall booms. The privatisation of public sector utilities has resulted in South West Water having a monopoly on prices, they can charge what they want for water and they do.
  
There is certainly still a sense of grief and melancholy over the loss of the tin mining heritage. Many towns have been stripped of their cultural identity and are only now coming to terms with the new one that has been forced upon them. Tourism. What Neil Kennedy and Nigel Kingcome entitled “The Disneyfication of Cornwall” is painfully apparent to the major part of the Cornish population. The oversaturation of romanticised media of the Cornish landscape has bred an intoxicating cultural identity for tourists, a hyper-reality that leaves out one of the major components of this beautiful county; the Cornish people. If the locals are mentioned it is often in the same whispered breath as words like ignorant, inbred and hostile. This is only intensified by certain media such as the 2002 BBC program ‘The Wild West.’

In this identity the local populace of Cornwall are left only one role, and that is to serve. There is no place for us in this projected identity. The drawing factor for the vast majority of tourism is not to associate with the culture of the people but to appreciate the landscape, leaving many locals with a bitter taste in their mouths and a feeling of their heritage being ground down by the feet of tourists. The dependency of this industry, 24% of our GDP, increases the sour taste and is highlighted by the use of the Old English term ‘emmet’ to refer to the swollen summer populace. The word translates as ‘ant’ and if you spend much time in the streets or beaches of holiday time Cornwall the reason for this becomes apparent. Five million holiday makers flock to our coast every year. In perspective this is ten times the amount of people that actually live in Cornwall (around 532,300). This dramatic seasonal change in the economy lends a deeper tenseness to the winter here than just the shift in weather. Shops that were packed with costumers, queues winding round there over-stuffed shelves become so desolate that it’s not even worth opening. Padstow is a ghost-town in the winter. The main buildings around the harbour may as well be boarded up, all this space is pre-designated for tourists and it doesn’t stop at the shops. There’s an estimated 22,000 second homes in Cornwall that in the frozen months stand empty and lifeless, further evidence of the instability of an economy built on tourist trade.

Picture perfect Cornwall is packaged and repackaged through postcards. The tourist sensibility tends towards images of the land and its marks; rustic thatched cottages, idyllic harbours framed with lush flowers, isolated white summer beaches contrasting with the glistening turquoise sea. Every one of these images enhances this lonely rural idea of Cornwall in tourist’s eyes. Like the most photographed barn in America in Don Delillo's superb novel White Noise; “no-one see’s the barn, [...] once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” Once the image is photographed and reproduced the viewer only see’s what he expects to see, what he has been told he has seen. The complex nature of the reproduction of images is exasperated by the internet. One click and thousands of images appear each one more typical than the next.

One of the major problems of this perception of Cornwall is that the local people are furiously protective of their land and culture. Plenty of locals long for independence, devolution, a Cornish Assembly. They cite distinctly different cultural and genetic identities between the Cornish and the rest of England, much in the same way that the Welsh do. The Cornish have their own language which, sadly, is now mostly reduced to place names; Porthtowan, Carharrack, Carn Brea, Tehidy, Penhallow, Callenick...

All of this begs the question that is poignantly scrapped into the walls of the closed South Crofty mine “But when all the fish and tin’s gone, what are Cornish boys to do?”