Sea of Faith
Wanting to travel past our horizons and learn what lies beyond calls to the
basic human desire to discover. To go beyond our horizons is to find a
better life in a more plentiful land, to have new experiences and to
explore. The journey itself is a romantic notion, with hopes and
aspirations, expectations of anticipated discovery.
Thousands of people every year travel to Britain via Dover, some on holidays
and others to settle and to start a new life. But does this romantic concept
of the journey hold true? Once they are shuffled off the clinical and stark
ferries, they are presented with the actuality of Britain. What people
expect from their journey and what they are actually presented with may be
very different.
It is this sense of reality versus expectation that these images aim to
address. The photographs are not just a study of Dover’s reality in
comparison to people’s expectations, but an example of what reality brings
to the hopes and dreams of others. How reality often does not live up to
what we expect; we place faith in our beliefs of what our journeys will
entail but the truth beyond our horizons can be disappointing.
This feeling of disappointment is encapsulated by Matthew Arnold’s poem
Dover Beach, from which the title of this project is taken. Not only is the
poem about Dover, but it is also about the starkness of reality and how the
sea with all its beauty and intrigue can still produce a failing reality.
