Richmond’s elegiac, sombre ode to a coastal stretch of the Bristol Channel poetically weaves together lives hit by decades of austerity and isolation.

Along this twenty-mile stretch of one of the world's longest coastal mudflats, Richmond’s Love Bites encounters those attempting to find meaning and pleasure within small-town England. Beneath everyday photographs of food banks, punks, pleasure arcades, swingers’ clubs, shelters and new-build houses, Richmond finds a waning unease to his subjects: a listless microcosm of post-austerity, post-Brexit Britain. Love Bites allows these tensions to simmer on the surface: food poverty, isolation, commercial decline, housing precarity, homelessness, unfulfilled desire and longing mingle in the overcast, wide skies of the channel and its flat, sprawling coastline.

Continuing in a long line of British photographers that weave poetry and lyricism into social documentary projects, Richmond uses a delicate colour palette and sympathetic lens to capture the everyday realities of isolation and desire in this corner of Southwest England.

• Tim Richmond (b. 1959) is a British photographer based in Colorado specialising in long-term documentary projects. His first book, Last Best Hiding Place, was published in 2015, and his work is housed in many private collections and has been shown internationally. Richmond’s work has been featured in L’Uomo Vogue, Telegraph Magazine, Vanity Fair, World of Interiors, Wonderland, Port, and many others.

• Special Edition also available

  
  
  
• 136pp, 280 × 220 mm, 84 photos
  Faux-leather silkscreened hardcover
  ISBN 978-1-912719-34-1 
  March 2022

• Nearest Truth #320: Tim Richmond
  
  
• Press:
• Libération (paywall, in French)
• The Guardian
• Collector Daily
• Widewalls
• Dazed
• i-D
• AnOther
• Bilderstrum
• Elephant
• BJP
• Photomonitor
• HERO