In this chapter,the image foregrounds the coastal landscape as an engineered system of control rather than a neutral environment.The long, receding fence line cuts decisively across the frame, transforming open marshland into a regulated space.Although modest in scale,the fence echoes much larger border architectures,situating this rural edge of the Fylde coast within a global visual language of containment,surveillance, and exclusion.
Historically,this logic of separation finds precedent in the Plague Ship narrative. The fear of contagion arriving by sea required a spatial solution:danger was held offshore,managed through distance rather than engagement.The fence performs a contemporary version of this gesture.It does not respond to an immediate threat but materialises an inherited anxiety the impulse to draw lines,establish barriers and define who or what is permitted to cross.
In the context of modern migration,the fence becomes symbolically charged.While it does not physically block the sea,it reinforces a mindset in which movement is perceived as risk.This resonates with broader national responses to migrant crossings, where policies of deterrence are enacted through visible infrastructures rather than humanitarian solutions.The fence mirrors the logic applied at sea:goods are allowed to flow freely through invisible channels of global trade,while human movement is rendered suspicious and subject to control.
Drawing on Allan Sekula’s analysis in Fish Story,the image exposes the contradiction at the heart of maritime capitalism.The same coastal spaces that facilitate global circulation are simultaneously fortified against certain forms of arrival.The fence therefore operates as a quiet but potent symbol of selective permeability an architecture that allows economic flows to pass unchecked while reinforcing social and political boundaries.
Ultimately,this photograph positions the coastline as a living archive of fear.The fence does not merely mark land;it records a continuity of defensive thinking that stretches from plague quarantine to contemporary border politics.In doing so,the image reveals how landscapes absorb and reproduce collective anxieties,turning everyday structures into enduring monuments to exclusion.