In Whitley Bay between 1976 and 1980, Markéta Luskačová photographed the North East seaside as a social world shaped by weather, class, family ritual and modest pleasure. Families arrived with children; older couples walked with grandchildren; teenagers courted, dogs ran free, and ponies and donkeys carried the unmistakable atmosphere of a day’s outing. The beach was not an abstract landscape but a shared public space, organised around tents, cafés, tea, pies and the practical improvisations of people determined to enjoy themselves despite the cold.
Luskačová, born in Czechoslovakia and resident in Britain from 1975, first encountered the region while visiting Chris Killip in 1976. Her return in 1978, invited by the Amber film and photography collective to work alongside Martine Franck, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Paul Caponigro, gave the series a wider documentary context. Yet the photographs are distinguished by their closeness. Rather than treating the seaside as picturesque spectacle, Luskačová attends to its worn pleasures and everyday dignity, with an affection that remains alert and unsentimental.
By The Sea: Photographs from the North East 1976-1980 brings this body of work together in a 2019 hardcover publication from RRB PhotoBooks, issued alongside an exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation. The book is consequently more than a sequence of individual beach photographs: it records a particular coastline and its working communities while preserving the perspective of an outsider who became sufficiently involved to see the place from within its routines.
For collectors, the volume merits attention for the way it enlarges the history of postwar British documentary photography. Luskačová’s North East is neither a supporting study to better-known seaside projects nor a sentimental portrait of national leisure. It is a sustained account of shared space, economic limitation and resilient pleasure, and a valuable presentation of work that has long been respected within photographic circles but has reached a broader readership only gradually.
