Its difficult to be romantic about the sea when it makes you vomit up your breakfast. When it robs you of days, weeks, months and years that you could be spending in the warm bosom of your loved ones. And its hard to be romantic about the sea when it promises riches, full pockets, fast cars, bang-up weekends on the lash, paid-off mortgages, but actually delivers disappointment, debt and resentment.
The sea is a complicated place – a mixture of wonder, awe, boredom, unspeakable beauty and addictive seduction.
Rhona’s beautiful, haunting, funny and insightful images do a fantastic job of capturing the whole gamut of feelings and experiences that the sea forces upon the men who make their living, by choosing to live some of their lives at the mercy of the biggest natural untamed force on this planet.
Thona’s is a very personal perspective of the people who have the courage and audacity to drag life out of the sea and sell it to all of us who delight in eating her bounty. And of course, it’s easy to be romantic about the sea with a mouthful of warm tangy crab flesh between your lips. It’s not so easy to be romantic about the sea when you’ve bust your hole pulling those same crabs out of her depths.
Rhona’s photographs remind me why I love the sea. And also why I fear it.
Text by Nick Fisher
About the author:
Rhona McDade was born in 1994 in the small seaside town of Brixham, Devon. She is now living and working in London having recently graduated from Westminster University in 2016 with a first class honours in Contemporary Media Practice. Her passion for photography and curiosity about her father’s work as a deep sea fisherman led to her creating this project. She boarded the same deep-sea crabbing vessel her father once worked on and documented the fishermen whilst they worked at sea in the German Bite, Holland.
