Prussia Cove in Photographs

The Prussia Cove residential trip is a highly-anticipated rite of passage for third-year writing students.

As a keen photographer, when my turn came, I wanted to capture the weekend with my camera. From sharing stories around a beach bonfire, to uncovering relics of the coastline’s shipwrecking history, there were plenty of interesting experiences to document.

Initially, this was just going to be presented as a pure photo essay, sticking to my photojournalism roots. However, the words were flowing at Prussia Cove and it would almost be criminal not to incorporate writing of some description.

So, I succumbed to the words and crafted a poem to flow across the nineteen photographs, aiming to give a sense of the experience and create a narrative of the weekend.

The idea was to evoke the feeling of a scrapbook, by styling the text as handwritten notes across the photographs. I shaped the words along the contours of the subjects, following the line of a branch or wave to unify the written and visual elements.

In a world of airbrushing and social media filters, I wanted the photographs to be authentic and showcase the skills that went into taking them. Asides from a slight crop or rotation of a handful of photographs, they remain true to what was captured on camera, giving a genuine experience of seeing the weekend through my eyes – or my lens.

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First published on FalWriting in March 2025.