In 2013, Magnum photographer Martin Parr asserted that seaside, or ‘beach’, photography had its roots in the British photographic tradition:

The history of British photography certainly sees repeated fascination with the shore-line, coastal communities, and the capturing of seaside cultures by both photographic artists and commercial photographic practitioners. For the latter's seaside photographs, adherence to certain loose aesthetic norms and conventions springs to mind: happy, intergenerational faces; depiction of carefree moments of leisure at the shore-line; joyful, healthy and idealised children; and adult playfulness throwing off the working day to be replaced by acts of buffoonery, larks and partially clothed jolly japes. Such conventions are indeed the norm from the early 1900s until commercial seaside photography largely collapsed by the mid-1970s.

However, further back in time, in the second half of the 1800s, we see photographic seaside portraits that markedly contrast with the contemporary twentieth-or twenty-first-century viewer's expectations. The first fifty years (1850–1900) of this type of commercial photographic practice saw significant and rather rapid modification of customer demand, experience and product – the photograph. In comparison with contemporary image-making, early photographic seaside portraiture shows clear differentiation in aesthetic, typically signified through absence: the seaside as explicit location is missing (even the bathing costume), and most notably there is an absence of smile. The photographic smile, in the contemporary photographic era, has become virtually ubiquitous and mandatory, signifying in Audrey Linkman's view ‘the fun-loving, warm-hearted, popular and charming’. As an exemplar, the seaside resort of Ramsgate in Kent can be used to raise several related questions: how did the early Victorian photographic client seek to be visually represented? At what point did beach photographic portraiture evolve into smiling snaps, and what part was played by the seaside photographer?