Abstract

Surfing’s visual culture frequently privileges spectacle, athletic performance, and idealised conditions, leaving everyday embodied and sensory experiences under-explored. Drawing on Mark’s experience as a photographer and long-term surfer, this practice-as-research project asks how collaborative lens-based ethnography might explore surfers’ sensorial, embodied and immersive experiences. Informed by phenomenology and sensory ethnography, it combines interviews, participant-generated photography, wearable cameras, in-water narration and collaborative filmmaking across the U.K. The research investigates how these methods reveal lived experience whilst recognising the limits of visual representation. It considers how artistic practice might approach experiences that resist articulation through image or language.

This body of practice-led research continues Mark’s fascination with the delineation of the everyday.

Interested in contributing to this research?

This project explores surfing and embodied experience through a lens-based practice. If you would like to learn more about participating, please view the participant information below.