In October 2024, I showed interest in participating in a research project led by Videoclub, part of Dreamy Place, and financed by the Heritage Fund. The project revolved around researching the cab road tunnel located under Brighton Railway Station. Working with a historian, Jackie Marsh-Hobbs, group members were assigned to undergo research on various aspects of the tunnel’s history, which would later result in an exhibition at Phoenix Art Space.
At first I had difficulties finding my space within the project, all other participants were considerably older than me while I was expecting a student based group. As the first informative sessions went by I wasn’t really sure I was interested in any part of the tunnel’s history and struggled to get started on what I was expected to do. At that stage I reached out to Annis Joslin and Jamie Wyld, both part of Videoclub and Dreamy Place, and explained by situation. I let them know that due to my studies and practice, perhaps focusing on photographically documenting the tunnel would be better suited for me as beneficial towards my portfolio but also more enjoyable for me considering my interests. Research and history are areas that I’m quote drawn to generally but I didn’t feel I had a place in this project originally, thankfully Annis and Jamie understood my situation and thought a good idea for me to focus on photography. We were going to need a high amount of visual material for the exhibition as most of the research outcome from other group members was mostly going to be textual. We put together a team of photographers consisting of Zoë Montgomery, Mike Anton, and myself. Annis Joslin also contributed to the visual element production with video and sound pieces.
In total we visited the cab road tunnel five time between October 2024 and January 2025. The first few visits were mostly for the whole group to visually familiarize themselves with the location they were researching, whilst the later trips only contained members of the image-making team and focused on photographing the tunnel. Our trips didn’t restrain to the cab road tunnel, we also got to explore the rifle range, the goods tunnel, and WW2 service rooms. I photographed the tunnels using two of my medium format film cameras, a 6×6 Hasselblad 500c and a 6×4.5 Mamiya, on black and white film. I liked the approach of capturing this historical place on analog material, which aesthetically linked back to the project’s research nature. Without the presence of modern objects acting as anachronism, the images I captured could look like they were taken 50 years ago. My aesthetic choice came with several technical difficulties, the absence of light in the tunnels made it primordial to push my film to at least 1600iso on my Hasselblad, and even though my Mamiya is equipped with a flash I couldn’t always see what I was framing or where I was focusing. A solution to that was to always focus on infinity and stay at a distance from my subject, and use my phones flashlight to see where I was framing the best I could.
Despite the technical difficulties on location I was satisfied with the series I was able to capture during our tunnel visits. I think the most interesting part of the process was proceeding to the curation of images with Annis and Jamie, even though they had the final word on which images would be in the exhibition I was able to work closely with them at that stage. We also needed to select and resize some images fore website that would accompany the exhibition, as our research group gathered so much material that couldn’t be contained in the show the decision of adding a website to group everything in one place was taken. I assisted Annis and Jamie with the exhibition’s installation alongside Zoë Montgomery’s help, we curated and installed the “Artistic Interpretation” and “How” sections of the show.
Overall this experience was enriching, it made me consider applying to other research based projects in the future. Maybe I’d like to get involved with the research aspect of it later on but uncovering new knowledge with the help of other participants or professionals is an experience I would like to reiterate in the future.