Hayleigh Longman

a conversation with Hayleigh Longman
by Anne Kimunguyi 

Hayleigh Longman is a London-based photographer, whose practise centres around portraiture and social documentary, driven by her relationship to her subjects. Her ongoing series, ‘The Breath before the Dive’ depicts her family and friends over the last four years, during annual holidays in Portugal. Drawn to the ‘ritual of poolside moments’ that intersperse these shared holiday memories, Longman seeks to capture the instances of play and joy as expressed through the human form, and their connection to water.

Your images set their subjects within the outdoors and bodies of water. Portraits depict a woman sunbathing, draped over a lounge chair with her bare back towards the sky, and a leg submerged in pool water, its foot poking out playfully to indicate the submerged state of the rest of its owner’s body. Elsewhere, two people – presumably a parent and child - embrace joyfully in the pool, while in another photograph we see the back of a person on the beach, photographed by another sat on the same chair closely behind them, their knee visible in the corner of the frame.

Throughout this series, the sunny outdoors is a site for relaxation, closeness and play, each person photographed seemingly with their guard down, as backs face the camera, eyes close and bodies submerge backwards into water.

Can you expand on this relationship between landscape, water, and vulnerability?

The environment is the Algarve in Portugal, where my family and friends have been visiting for over thirty years. It's a place that has a really strong sense of history for us as a group. I became really fascinated by the interplay between people in the swimming pool. Walls filled with water that completely draw people in. It invites you to change your body language, adapting to a completely new environment. It gives you permission to make contact with one another outside the norms in the way you do when you’re on the ground and I became fascinated by this thought. 

Both the body and pool are made up of water, so there is this shared chemistry between the two which encourages freedom. When I think about the sea I don’t have the same sense of freedom as it comes with limitations. Whereas the pool is designed for play and allows us to move our bodies in ways we can’t on earth. It also makes your mind more fluid as you float or submerge yourself. 

How did you find expressions of love are shaped in, or by, this setting?

 The setting (pool) invites you in and the group is influenced by the space - to be able to move playfully in the water. This was my first observation that made me want to pick up my camera. There were small moments of pure love in the way everyone interacted in the water, whether that was cuddling, splashing one another, seeing how long each other could hold their breath, or doing their best dive. These notions of touching and engaging in the water is the expression of love that I was enchanted by.  

The architecture of holiday-making – beach loungers, sun-umbrellas, open-air swimming pools – feature throughout your scenes. Whilst enabling the leisure activities of those depicted, they also suggest a temporariness to their relaxation, which is structured in ways difficult to replicate in or extend to everyday life.

How do you navigate the transient nature of holidays with the immortalisation or timelessness of the photographic medium that depicts it? 

It's a reflection of the place, time and memories, of course. Holidays are fleeting and so are the moments in the water. However, when I began to think about it more seriously, the pool represents a capsule. Each year the same location, the same (or if not very similar) group of people, just older and holding more memories and connections to the space. So I feel as though the group are revisiting the transient nature of a holiday through their annual return to this space. The repetitive cycle of which makes me think about the idea of dream states, or recurring dreams. 

What guided your thoughts when bridging these two (or multiple) temporalities? For me, this work seeks to do just that – to unpick the temporary condition of the holiday into something that can seep beyond its inevitable end.

I would observe family and friends running in and out of the pool and how infectious it is when one person gets in everybody wants to join. I started to think about how the bodies take on a new form or shape when submerged under the water. The silhouettes and shadows that the bodies create when submerged under the water is something I was really keen to try and photograph. I thought about the movement of the water and the fluid body language that comes with these invitations from the space. Due to gravity and the buoyant effect of water bringing the body to the surface, these shapes and figures would be gone in a second, forever moving and flowing through one another. 

Anne Kimunguyi is a London-based writer, editor and arts administrator.

This work was featured in Splash & Grab’s exhibition DREAM STATES, curated by Hannah Geddes.
Hayleigh Longman was a member of Splash & Grab’s studio residency with BOW ARTS.