Listless nights and warm beer: Chanel Irvine's portraits of English summertime

As the country contended with Brexit and the pandemic, the photographer turned her lens on its coastal towns, villages and canals, searching for the magic of summerAn English summer is many things. Technically, it is a season: an expanse of time that stretches, depending on weather and definition, from June's hedgerow flowers to the overripe reaches of late August. In the imagination, it is something much more. It is a myth, a memory, a balancing act between hope and reality. It is long-recalled picnics in high heat, the grass dry enough to scratch beneath the blanket. It is fish and chips eaten beneath overcast skies. It is listless nights with no air conditioning, bikinis in the park at the first hint of sun, lukewarm beers, baking asphalt, loud music, reckless decisions, grey bank holidays where the shoreline becomes a sea of anoraks. It is a hundred and one cliches and childhoods and cultures and contrasting experiences rolled into one.Burford, Oxfordshire, 2020. Continue reading...