You Have Been Warned, Towyn

Michael Bennett’s Pier Closing Time is an extraordinarily austere document of coastal resorts in North Wales during two seasons of 1979. It had been forgotten about for 40 years but has now been rescued, restored and made available for the first time as a book. Pier Closing Time is available from Cow on the Roof Press

Weather Information, Llandudno

Pier Closing Time is on a virtual UK tour as part of Seaside: Photographed. In 2021, the exhibition hopes to tour to other places with a connection to the seaside, including Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange (13 February to 5 June) and the Grundy, Blackpool (27 June to 5 September)

Kiosk, Rhyl

Bennett’s work foreshadowed a significant decline in visitors to such resorts throughout the 1980s

Beach Shelter

Mournful of a lost world, always ironic, this is a bittersweet portrait of seaside resorts in and out of season

Beach Shelter, Rhyl

The project arose when the Mostyn Gallery in Llandudno was due to reopen in 1979 after decades of closure. Its director commissioned a photographic project from Bennett, with the intention of capturing the atmosphere of North Wales coastal resorts in winter

King Size Hotdogs, Rhyl

With a working title of Anatomy of Melancholy, an exhibition was scheduled soon after the gallery’s refurbishment and reopening. Bennett’s project was ultimately deemed likely to cause funding problems by showing the region’s resorts in too negative a light

Family Group, Rhyl

The solution put forward by the new artistic director, Clive Adams, was to commission images of the same places in summer, in the hope that the show would be more upbeat. Yet while summer brought more people to the resort areas, there was no fundamental change in character to the images. Fearful that the finished show would be a catastrophe, Adams asked amateur photographers to exhibit their own work alongside Bennett’s, to counter its perceived pessimism

Kissing couple, Rhyl

Renamed The Road to Barmouth, the exhibition opened in 1980. It received hostile local newspaper reviews, and on closure it was dismantled and forgotten

On the Beach, Towyn

The original film negatives have been restored, digitised and remastered for this book

Rollerskating at Butlin’s

Butlin’s Pwllheli was open from 1947 until 1987

Bus Station, Colwyn Bay

The project would have stayed out of sight for ever had it not been for Val Williams and Karen Shepherdson, curators of Seaside Photographed, an exhibition first seen at Margate’s Turner Contemporary museum in 2019

Pier Closing Time

Following a public call for submissions, Bennett sent images from the North Wales project. You can read more about it here

Family in Snack Bar, Prestatyn

Writing in the Observer, critic Laura Cumming said: ‘Michael Bennett’s black and white photographs from the late 1970s show seasides from Llandudno to St Leonards as melancholy and austere in every season, homing in on the weather-beaten faces of solitary workers – the signalman, the kiosk girl, the caretaker lugging the barrier to a pier in dark rain at closing time. They are starkly poignant laments’