Once a year, the market town of Bridport on Britain’s quaint southwest coast is overtaken by a swarm of revellers in eclectic hats. The Bridport Hat Festival is a relatively young affair, having taken place every summer since 2010, but the enthusiasm and excitement which surrounds it more than makes up for its comparative youth. This year, photographer Samuel Bradley headed out to it, camera in hand, to document its greatest talents.
Like so many British summertime events, the weather took no pity on attendees. “I went with the idea of shooting colour,” Bradley explains of his mission. “I wanted it to be sunny, and I had this idea for how everything was going to look, but instead there were like two hours of dark grey skies followed by torrential rain. So I was like ‘okay, I’ll just switch to black and white’. It did end up working quite well, actually. It’s almost slightly cultish looking and dark, which I quite like.” As such, the resulting photographs have a distinct British look to them – all suburban eccentricity, tinged with a moodiness particular to our little island. “People look quite serious, but at the same time they’re wearing these really stupid creations. There’s something sombre about it all.”
The stars of the fair were many and diverse, from one man dressed head-to-toe as a clockwork robot – guests clamoured for his photograph, leaving Bradley understandably reluctant to join the throngs of onlookers – to unwitting passers-by. His favourite is one of a young girl wearing a fur-lined cowboy hat, leaning against a lamppost. “It’s quite subtle – you wouldn’t have thought ‘oh, what a weird situation!’ It could almost be a documentary photograph taken in the south of the US or something. It’s simple but I think it just works really well.”
This particular shot captures a moment of relative peace at the parade – onlookers stand huddled together against the elements, watching the awards being dished out by a panel of judges. It provided an ideal window of time for Bradley, who snuck around the outskirts of the throng, taking advantage of the distraction. “They have lots of different categories, like best couple for example, and people go up onto a podium to receive a prize,” he says. “It was a good time to sneak up behind everyone and take photos of the backs of their heads. Often people have this permanent smile fixed to their faces, when what you’re trying to do is take images which are a bit weird and unsettling. When people were distracted, that was the best time for me.”
