Shadowy Brighton: A History of Silhouettes at the Seaside

This talk casts new light on a 150-year shadowy seaside story, looking at what can be learned about Brighton cutters and sitters. Silhouette cutters were once a feature on all of Brighton's piers. They cut visitors' profiles on the Chain Pier in its earliest days, and continued when Brighton became the home to one of the first photographic studios in the 1840s. On the West Pier, magician and entertainer Hubert Leslie cut more than 20,000 silhouettes of seaside holidaymakers in the interwar years. Arthur Forrester, meanwhile, used giant pruning scissors to create side views of Palace Pier tourists. By the time his studio closed in the 1970s, Forrester claimed to have cut a million faces. This talk casts new light on a 150-year shadowy seaside story, looking at what can be learned about Brighton cutters and sitters from this dark art. Annebella Pollen is Professor of Visual and Material Culture at University of Brighton. She is a Trustee of the West Pier Trust. She has previously given talks at the West Pier Centre on insulting Victorian valentines, saucy Edwardian postcard messages, British nudism and the surprisingly radical history of socks and sandals. (Image:Hubert Leslie, Tourists on the West Pier, Brighton, cut paper silhouette, 1923. NPG D46509 (c) National Portrait Gallery, London.)