Portsmouth Open: Billie Rae Cawte

Scenic Tourist brings photographs from a personal archive into the present by projecting them onto locations around Portsmouth. By placing archival images within new contexts, familiar places become sites for imagined memories, shaped by each viewer’s own experiences and interpretations.

The photographs come from an archive gathered over several years through purchase and donation from different families. Using locations around Portsmouth’s seafront provides a starting point for memory and association. For local viewers, these places may carry personal significance; for others, they provide a visual context through which the photographs can be interpreted.

Through this process, Scenic Tourist explores how archival photographs can be revisited, reinterpreted and transformed, allowing unrelated people, places and moments to form new connections.