In the newly unveiled body of work entitled Sandscript, the photographer-artist Charles March (better known in aristocratic circles as the Duke of Richmond) invites us to observe what normally goes unnoticed: the ephemeral marks left by wind, wave and seagrass on the sand. His fine-tuned eye turns these transient inscriptions into understated, almost calligraphic, visual poems.
March’s back-story is itself remarkable: he began early in photography, working for the film director Stanley Kubrick on Barry Lyndon, before moving into advertising, reportage and then a fine art practice under his adopted professional name. Now, alongside his role as custodian of the storied Goodwood Estate and the associated motorsport and cultural endeavours, he continues to cultivate his quietly radical photography.
In Sandscript, at London’s Hamiltons Gallery from 4th November 2025 to 16th January 2026, March abandons the camera-motion technique that characterised prior work and instead holds the camera still, allowing sand, wind and sea to engage in the gesture. The camera is no longer a tool to represent reality but the brush of the artist. The result: images that no longer feel like landscapes as such, but close-up studies of texture and fleeting movement – fragments of natural phenomena caught in liminal states. “I looked for what was near me, for very small things that are visually exciting,” he explains.
What resonates most is the blend of minimalism and emotion. The works are quiet yet charged: grasses ripple, sand ridges shift, shadows stretch in an instant of time. March himself puts it plainly: “I’m doing something which is really changing the way the camera looks at the subject. I’m not trying to achieve accurate representation. It’s more of a feeling and getting people to look at things differently.” The tonal palette is subtle, the composition deceptively simple, yet the effect lingers.
Charles March, Sandscript, Series 3, 01, I, 2025. This triptych was created with three different pictures covering almost a mile of beach. The thousands of tiny bits of detritus captured by the artist’s camera create an ever-changing language that never repeats itself.
For the viewer accustomed to grandiose photographic spectacle, Sandscript offers a more hushed, contemplative experience. These are works you dwell on rather than pass by: the shifting line of the horizon, the blurred trace of grass blowing, the suggestion of an erased mark on sand. In this sense, March has created a kind of visual haiku; the image may be small, the gesture modest, but the emotional range is vast. It took March four years to complete the works shown in this exhibition. “I spent hours and hours on the beach and took thousands of shots,” he shares, “looking for the composition I wanted to appear in front of me and often, when it happened, it was washed away before I could capture it.”
The same patience than it took to capture these moments of transient beauty is demanded from the viewer. Each artwork is an invitation to stillness, which, in a bustling gallery context, may be a quiet rebellion. But that is precisely the strength of this show: it asks us to slow down.
In sum: for those interested in photography that pushes beyond documentation into meditation, Sandscript is a compelling, elegant show — a refined passage of time, tide and mark-making by a photographer equally at ease with aristocratic legacy and artistic modesty.
Sandscript by Charles March
4th November 2025 – 16th January 2026
Hamiltons Gallery
13 Carlos Pl, London W1K 2EU
Author: Julia Pasarón
Lead image: Charles March, Sandscript, Series 1, 01, I, 2025
Photo of Charles March © Julian Broad.
Show Comments +