Photohastings is a loose collective – a network of photographers who exhibit together and jointly publish their work. Supporting each other this way, they can take on bigger spaces, share costs, and extend publicity. They have recently held a series of shows at St Andrew’s Mews, off Queen Street near the New Town.

One of this talented group is quietly-spoken, articulate Rod Morris, whom I spoke to in his studio on the top floor of a Georgian terraced cottage in West Street, a lesser-known area of the Old Town just behind the seafront. “This is a lovely street,” he enthuses. “Do you know it has its own newspaper, The West Street Chronicle?” Indeed it has a flamboyant history of smugglers, suffragettes, fascists, druids and Pre-Raphaelites, not necessarily in that order.

It is appropriate that Morris’s studio has this diverse and fascinating background, given the exceptional variety and quality of his work.  It’s small, warm, quaint, and well-organised, and I was privileged to look over past and recent photographs while we talked. He is currently gathering a collection of prints for a show in a London gallery. While he makes his living from film-making, his exceptional collection of personal works covers a huge range of subjects from everywhere – a continuing life history.

“This picture got me started in my career,” he told me, showing me the memorable photograph of a bus driver in Egypt. “I won a competition with it, and the prize was a return plane ticket to anywhere in the world and a camera, which I sold.” All his photographs are in black and white – “I’ve had this same Pentax for about 30 years,” he goes on, showing me a traditional, non-digital camera.  “I use digital for film and commercial jobs, but I see this as more my personal work, pictures that have stayed with me and still have meaning.” 

We talk a little about the difference between photojournalism and the art of photography. “I studied photojournalism and just as I’d finished, this guy came in and said ‘Objectivity is dead, and subjectivity is everything.’ A lot of people were really angry. But I thought, I totally get this. We’re affected by our experiences, and to ignore that is madness. Journalism is all about the specifics. But a good enough image that suggests things to the viewer will live longer in the memory.” 

Supporting this idea, he shows me a series where “We don’t know who the subject is, but we can make all sorts of assumptions and can see different stories. I’ve always liked to ask questions, rather than provide answers.” So a poster-sized print of four guys in suits, who look like they might belong to the Yakuza or Cosa Nostra, was taken in San Francisco. They could merely be four businessmen out for a walk on Russian Hill. With the current collection (Still Films) he is, though, unusually, submitting written narratives along with the photographs.  He shows me the photo with the little girl at the centre, taken  in the house of a German musician in Venezuela, and tells me the story.

“I wondered why there was this quality of musician living In that remote place. It turned out that he had had a brief relationship there while travelling, but some time later the woman wrote to him and said that she had become pregnant but wasn’t expecting anything of him, just letting him know. He thought long and hard then went out there. They all lived together and they set up this jazz club, but then the woman (now his wife) passed away when the child was still very young.

“I asked whether he had wanted to go back to Germany, and his family.  But he said no, he could never leave this house because of the presence of his wife. As we walked into this room, his daughter sat in the hammock, and the light entered the room and suddenly her mother was there. A second later the light had gone, and she was gone as well.”  There are similar poignant histories relating to a range of photographs taken variously in (for example) Venezuela, Cuba, Egypt, San Francisco, England, and New York. 

There’s a certain angularity of composition, a careful geometry, that seems characteristic of all his work: “Some people say that I have the same shapes in all my pictures” he remarks. One of the  dozens of photos I am privileged to see is taken from the middle of the Millennium Bridge, looking towards St Paul’s. A man in a wheelchair has his back to the camera, and the line of his head is centred exactly between the converging lines of the bridge to the centre of St Paul’s dome. It’s a fine, memorable shot.  

Asked about the constraints of making a living from photography, he is definitive. “I’ve always made a living. Most people on my course (photojournalism at UAL: London College of Communication) went on to do conflict photography. Some of them died. I stayed in London for my final show and happened to knock on the door of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They were on my doorstep, a little way away from the college.” The orchestra liked his photos so much that they exhibited them and had them made into cards. They are still on his client list. After the advent of digital photography, he taught himself how to edit film, and gradually his commissions changed from reportage stills to reportage documentary film-making. 

Though Morris has lived and worked in Rye, he and his partner lived in East London for some years with their triplets, who shared one room until they were fourteen. They moved down here to give them more individual space, but since then he hasn’t looked back. Like many other residents he really appreciates the amount of creative support there is here, especially from the photography community. His background is eccentrically artistic: his father worked as an architect who, to make life interesting, would add a Gothic chimney to a design for a factory, but was also able to play entire piano concertos from memory and play the violin. He also developed a serious understanding of photography. His love of music transmitted to his children; Morris always works to a musical accompaniment, which he feels has an effect on the ultimate product. 

Hastings and St Leonards, he suggests, “punch above their weight” in terms of creative production. I doubt anyone would disagree that his work adds strength to that punch. 

See more details at roadfactoryfilms.com/studio-info, and roadfactoryfilms on Instagram. For the Elliott Gallery exhibition, see elliott.gallery/rod-morris. Also at Photopia and Photohastings, photopia.co.uk and photohastings.org

Last time I was at Stade Hall it felt like a tiny flight hanger or a fishy Smithfields repurposed. Bright pale lights, stalls – open and spacious but also crammed. A bit malicious somehow. The noise was the white noise of buying and selling. It was raining outside, which it was this time too.

You might not immediately think of a high rise as being comfortable. You see it in the distance and, if you don’t live there, it can seem stark, cold, like that pale light of modernity that failed to start. In a way it’s easy to forget that the tower is a home – many homes stacked up together.

This time at Stade Hall, dark. The way a candle is dark. I was welcomed in, given a handbook. The drama of the hall’s high ceiling was softened by the low light. Columns of pictures looked like the foundation holding up an invisible world above. The installation came across quite simple; as I walked in, I saw cardboard and string, was funnelled towards a comfy chair in front of a TV – the scene that’s been a classic marker of the modern home since before shows like the Simpsons immortalised it. I noticed a background din but couldn’t pay much attention to what it was saying, just that it was plain speech rather than negotiation.

Turning a corner around the columns, words began to materialise, “lacks nature,” and I immediately saw the absence of green in the hall; “while I hate this place at the same time I really love it”. I settled on a video presentation: residents of a panelka in Kyiv talking about the homes they grew up in and live in, the need to bring countryside with them in planters or rustic furnishings. The “unaesthetic appearance” and lack of privacy in their modern block residences. For a moment they sound like refugees fleeing their homes into their homes…as though there was something necessarily nomadic about living close with so many people.

Other video presentations were set up opposite benches around the Hall, and the heart of the installation for me became this journey from bench to bench, following the sound as much as the visuals. The first bench lulled me into a dreamy, sleepy state, “I can feel the flat when it moves in the wind” but the murmurs about the room still rose and fell, prodding me awake and drifting back in waves. The chaos of life, surrounded by thin walls and an incessant whistle of the air passing by.

The next bench shook me awake and shouted. There was nothing too loud or angry on the screen but the soundscape had changed, become hostile. I panicked but stayed sat. I thought about my neighbours howling up through the floor, or in through the vent in the wall: having a domestic. Then I’d open my door directly onto theirs and he’d greet me with a smile as he left with the dog, and I didn’t know whether to seem sympathetic or critical or what; just deflated and stupid and scurried away. I couldn’t sit at the bench any longer and moved on to the final sound space.

Breathing. Something like a harp plays – some sweet strings – and apart from the occasional whip of discord, the place is calm again. The panic is banished to the background din I can hear just below the strings and calm reflections on Hastings’ Four Courts: little moments of daily life, high above the rest of the world but safe in a body of people.

Frank Moon’s sound design really made the installation: took me off guard and brought me right into the middle of the spaces and concepts that the whole show was about. Apart from the sound, video, pictures, there were a series of interactive exhibits. A mock-up kitchen (using the hall’s kitchenette) where you had the grounding experience of hanging socks up high. A miniturised rubbish chute that perfectly mimicked the noise of rubbish tumbling down many floors. And a weighted elevator model – that artery of transportation in the tower.

Rumbling beneath this exploration of modern urban living was the war. Residents’ introspective journeys were cut short by mentions of missiles, sirens and bomb shelters. It didn’t interfere enough to eclipse the main topic, but it was a serious presence.

High Rise Connecting Conversations ran alongside events in other Culture of Solidarity cities including Athens, Paris, Glasgow, Madrid and Warsaw. Culture of Solidarity is a European Cultural Foundation project that’s been funding collaborative enterprises since 2020, initially in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Lately it’s launched a European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) fund to specifically respond to events in Ukraine.

Find out more about the project’s team and funders at explorethearch.com.

Life in the High Rise: in the Residents’ Own Words

Hastings Four Courts

Bert

Here I’m on the 15th floor. Lovely view, can see Eastbourne on a good day. So I can go out and , you know, sit, on the balcony, have a smoke and just watch the world go by. Weather-wise, the flats when they were built, they’ve got a lean tolerance of 5% either way. They’re meant to have, with the wind. But I can feel the flat when it moves – it doesn’t worry me, I’m used to it. It’s like a reed in the wind, if it doesn’t bend in the wind, it breaks.

At the moment we’re suffering with a leak coming through one of the lights in the ceiling. We’ve been trying to get that sorted for two months. We’ve had people come out, people check, people go upstairs, it’s not moving forward. Repairs can be a problem at times to get them done.

Christine

I grew up in Lewes Road, and we used to play where they are now. It was just open land. All of us kids, we were quite young, we used to play on all the land, and in the woods, fish in the ponds – well, fish: get newts. Then suddenly

one day I thought “this is all being cleared out a bit”, you know, and then we saw, like, boring machines. They started building foundations and digging out… It changed the whole landscape, because they put in paths, and the whole rural thing – the woods and the little field bits, the tin huts – it all just went.

When all four of them were built, my auntie moved in… on the 12th floor. Just to look out of that front room window – it was like you were flying… but I’ve never flown, so wouldn’t know what that was like.

Kyiv

Anna

My privelege is that I live in such a house and don’t look at it. If you look out my window, you won’t see this ugly building, you’ll see a very beautiful building. At some point we were sitting with the girls trying to understand where we live. We have a wonderful apartment, but our privelege is that we live in a very ugly house compared to those around us, and we don’t see it. It’s not renovated, perhaps this is partly why it’s like this. It was abandoned some distant years ago, so it’s like an alien in the centre of the city.

Andrii

I don’t think, I know my neighbours can hear me playing the ukulele. And I feel embarrassed about it; it was embarrassing to learn how to play. The high rises mean relatively cheap and affordable housing for me at the moment. It’s ugly on the outside and often ugly on the inside. It doesn’t mean anything to me – the flats have their own peculiarities that you just have to put up with. Therefore I tried to sing quieter, and over time, of course, I got used to it. Once my neighbours even gave me a compliment, “Oh, you are singing. Are you learning to play?” I say, “Yes.” They say, “You’re doing well.” I thought they flatter me, of course.

Max

I usually hear how the neighbours from above constantly quarrel with each other. The neighbours from the side have loud dogs: on one side the dog is big, on the other small. They always greet me when I come home. The neighbours upstairs like to drag furniture to the window during an air raid siren: I understand. The siren starts and they drag some cabinets to the window, and this terrible sound even resembles the sound of a rocket. Sometimes I get angry with them because of this.

Svitlana

I want to say that we really teamed up during the first few days. About a quarter of the inhabitants of the house remained. It was the same for every building. People united, began to check the roofs, check the entrances, because there were many sabotage groups. The curfew was imposed, so we were staying at home, watching the news, and believing in the Ukrainian military 100%. Only the next day we started doubting. We only went to the basement once; it was very cold there, our parents got sick, and we decided not to go there anymore because the basement is not a bomb shelter. In case of a missile attack, you’ll be buried in the rubble in a mass grave.

The exhibition generally represents the members’ latest work – exploring intertwined stories of space against the background of a pandemic that has shifted our perception of what personal, professional and environmental ‘place’ means to us. Unplanned, even here, the exhibited work interacts with the physical space of the gallery and the natural elements outside it. The sun creates a light trail up to the left corner of the room, highlighting the sea surprised by Jeremy Llewellyn-Jones, whilst the wind plays with Sinéid Codd’s reflective objects, changing their angle and inviting us to pause, look – as she states in the title of her work. 

Saint Leonards Festival by Ian O’Leary

From celebrating suffragettes with Louise Whitham to crowd watching in Saint Leonards with Ian O’Leary, the exhibition is a carousel of emotions, offering a plethora of questions and answers on the topic of ‘place’. What does ‘my cup of tea’ mean? Do grey clouds predict that a threat is coming? What does the sea mean to us today and will we ignore its unjust power? Holiday or survival? Is destination an unexpected journey? Do we appreciate the free things in life? What will we learn from this?

Ian Land’s walks along the Sussex and Kent coast whilst Brexit is unfolding take an alien, distant look at familiar landscapes. Abkr Rastan’s images take us from Syria to St Leonards-on-Sea, inviting us to visually inhabit a space that explores both the absence of humans and the presence of light. Caoimhe McDonnell makes a parallel between coastal erosion and constant change, while Frank Francis questions whether the reader will follow the plot of accidental juxtapositions. Rod Morris entices our imagination with a shot reminiscent of a film noir still – we are left to ponder whether we are looking in the right direction. 

The group has an annual festival programme with opportunities for mentoring and workshops. Although lockdown has affected the normal working dynamic because of national restrictions, the members have met online and continued their creative practice. You can see the exhibition photographs and get more information about PhotoHastings on their website and Instagram.

Contributing photographers are : Sinéid Codd, Chris Coombes, Derek Cottrell, Frank Francis, Clare Hocter, Basil Jaber Alsheikh, Tracy Jones, Ian Land, Jeremy Llewellyn-Jones, Caoimhe McDonnell, Rod Morris, Patricia Morrow-Webb, Ian O’leary, Abkr Rastan, Louise Whitham. 

• A 36-page book of the exhibited photographs with text can be purchased via the Silverhill Press website. 
www.photohastings.org Instagram: @photohastings Facebook: @photohastings 

Students shot, directed and edited their own work, which was premiered at the Electric Palace Cinema in Hastings. Filmmaker Nick Winchester who attended the course said: “It was just the push I needed.” Winchester filmed at Hastings cemetery whilst the country was in the midst of a pandemic. In a twist to the gloom of the headlines, the camera found ‘life in death’s place’. One man in the film tells the camera how he came to the cemetery for his weekly exercise in lockdown. 

David Manning, a St Leonards local who attended the course, made a film about local potter, Lucy Cobb, who undertakes a journey along Hastings’ 140-million-year-old, wild coast, to collect her raw materials. 

Local Swimmer Zoe Bennett used the workshop to shoot and edit together intimate footage of the Azure Swimming Club and their solidarity at sea. Zoe says: “I learnt a lot and really enjoyed the week and will continue to refine my film.” 

Colleen Bartley interviewed people on the Pier with an open-ended question that served up some deep responses from locals and holidaymakers alike. She is continuing to edit her film and hopes to submit to film festivals when it is complete.

• Storytelling by the Sea will be running more workshops in the craft of documentary filmmaking. 

The next workshop will be running from the 5th October. 

• For more details or to book a place visit on storytellingbythesea.com