Dean Chalkley

Information

Never Turn Back

Never Turn Back is a photographic essay that pays homage to friendship, space and the free spirit found along the sea brimmed Norfolk Coast.

Featuring a ragtag pack, making their way across the coast in beat up clothes and beat up cars. Never Turn Back, tells their story. What was captured during those days, was cold, windy, and grey, but it was also green, luscious and everlasting.

Protagonists: Chris and Stephanie Jean Turpin, Jason Wick, Aimée Keeble, Rhianna Ellington and Luke Fox.

Never Turn Back – Poem

All is ever grey.

Sometimes razor blade lightning cuts the sky,
The land a quiet violence
Our boots like bulbous bruises, yea we like ‘em dirty,
They leave marks of us in smoke coloured sand
Here’s the sea: all swollen, fish scale silver
I think this has happened before
On English beaches
They tell me this is England,
And I think of salt and skin that is always dewy like grass in the dawn
A tired Kingdom, I suppose now-
Remember the flag that flapped like torn skin and the caravans like boiled eggs in a row and the crouched red buildings like old turtles

All is ever green-

Like the tiny heads of flowers,
little salt whipped faces of colour in the dunes,
Pull your shirt down, up, whichever-
You’ve got a milky hide anyway

We in the bunker by the sea,
Pretending to be drowned and triumphant
From the war
For the war
The one that rages invisible using our memories as fodder,
That is why we keep our ghosts inside,
And the gulls howl always

- Aimee Keeble