‘Whose story is it, anyway?’: perception, representation, and identity in textual and visual reportage of English seaside towns

Abstract

ABSTRACT In his study Storycraft, the veteran American journalist Jack Hart asks the following questions about reportage, memoir and other forms of nonfiction writing that proceed from the first-person perspective of their author: ‘Where’s the storyteller standing? What can he see and hear? Whose story is it, anyway?' (Hart, 2021, Storycraft: The complete guide to writing narrative nonfiction (p. 39). University of Chicago Press). The questions are suggestive of the formal and creative decisions reportage practitioners must make, but also of their ethical obligations to fairly represent their human subjects, especially if they are vulnerable, underprivileged and/or marginalized. The hinting at viewpoint – ‘whose story…’ – might also make us think about how identity is constructed from the stories we tell about ourselves and about our interactions with the world. This paper addresses all these issues primarily, though not exclusively, through the prism of Coast of Teeth, a practice-based visual and textual reportage project we completed in late 2022.