23.5°: A Solstice Surfscape Series

How often do you stop to take in the sunrise or sunset? Probably not as often as you’d like...

It’s easy to let them pass by uncelebrated, for one reason or another, even if you’ve created a life around being outdoors or by the sea with an uninterrupted view to the horizon. Life happens. And sometimes, in fact quite often here in the UK, the sun rises or sets behind a veil of cloud that hides it from our view.

For the last five years, twice a year on the winter and summer solstices, I’ve made a point of being present for both sunrise and sunset, bookending the day at my local beach. And I’ve been there with my camera, creating surfscape images to mark those moments whatever the weather, or surf, or quality of light is like.

It started on the winter solstice of 2020 as an excuse to go to the beach twice in one day. Then I wanted to see what the same images would look like in summer. It’s gone from there, and now here I am in June 2025, five years and twenty Solstice Surfscape images later.

On our annual lap around the sun, the solstices mark the moments when the northern or southern hemispheres are closest to or furthest away from the sun. They are a specific moment in time, although we all celebrate them as a calendar day. They are “peak season” and of all the 365 sunrises and sunsets that happen each year, the ones that happen on the longest and shortest days of the year are the ones that we humans celebrate the most. Because, deep down, we are all still connected to the natural cycle of the seasons.

The solstices are the peaks and troughs of the seasons through the year, just as high and low water on the coast are the peak and trough of the tide each day. And as it turns out, it’s all connected. The planetary collision four and half billion years ago that is the most widely accepted theory of how Earth got its Moon (the gravitational pull of which causes our tides) also knocked Earth onto a 23.5° tilt as it spins on its axis, giving us seasons and the solstices. If you surf then this giant impact that created wave-generating seasonal weather and tides has had a giant impact on your life. For me, that’s worth a few minutes of my attention four times a year.

The images that I make on the solstices are what I call “surfscapes”. If there’s a correct or common term for them, then I’ve never come across it. They are long exposure “intentional camera movement” photographs made by setting my camera up on a tripod on the sand pointing out to sea, making sure that the horizon is dead level, and then moving the camera from side to side whilst the shutter is open to blur everything into horizontal stripes.

Each exposure is less than a second long, and I make several images over the minute of sunrise or sunset and select the best one. Then I usually take some other photos and try to get in the sea.

On some December days it has been dark, stormy and the wind has been so strong that it’s blown my camera over. Some summer sunsets the beach has been so busy with people gathering to toast the solstice that I’ve had the blur of an excited dog running across the frame, or had to move to avoid getting people in my shot. Every official minute of sunrise the sun is actually hidden behind hills up the valley behind my local beach, so the sun never makes an appearance in those steel-blue dawn images.

The constraints and challenges of using the same camera and the same tripod, at the same beach, at exact times on certain days, are what make this project creatively fulfilling.

If I wanted to create the most beautiful and colourful surfscape image then I’d wait for ideal conditions and pick my moment. But then that photograph wouldn’t mean as much as these solstice images do, to me or to all of the people who seem to connect with and appreciate them.

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The full set of Mat Arney's Solstice Surfscapes from 2020-2025 will be exhibited at The MMI in St Agnes, Cornwall on July 26-27.

Find out more at www.solsticesurfscapes.com