These portraits were all made during a commission for the First Light Festival in June 2019: a non-stop, free, 24-hr festival celebrating Lowestoft as the most easterly point of the UK for the earliest sunrise of the year.

Using a promenade beach hut as a temporary portrait studio, I light painted a range of people from all walks of life, any age, basically anyone who was curious about what I was doing there. These people simply paused on their way to see a band on the main stage, or drifted along the prom until something took their eye or were curious enough to find out what a light painting experience was all about.

During a 30-second exposure, each of my subjects would sit inside the darkened beach hut of roughly 2m x 2m. With camera on tripod, I would then “paint” the light around the faces and features of my subjects using a range of torches and light pens in a unique choreography of movement in response to the features and details of the face - throwing blue light here, red light there, emphasising this feature, holding back there - much as one might control and influence the light by dodging and burning light when creating a print in the black and white darkroom.

For the festival commission I simply wanted to bathe each subject in light, and offer light play as a kind of therapeutic “healing” experience where my subjects are literally celebrated with light in a single condensed frame that encapsulates those 30 seconds. I feel that this approach is a way of honouring the uniqueness of each person, and seems to create a genuinely intimate and shared experience For both photographer and subject, a very real and very honest transaction takes place.

Prints were offered for sale, and 50% of profits raised from print sales were gifted to the Access Community Trust https://www.accessct.org in Lowestoft, for their work promoting social inclusion and building resilience through community. This series of portraits also includes some of the other artists I was fortunate enough to work alongside, as they presented their works in other beach huts nearby. The series below shows a range of light painted portraits made during that time.