Jack Orton photographs Portland, the island that has provided stone for the UK’s most famous buildings

The Isle of Portland holds an interesting place in the UK, both geographically and historically. It’s connected to the UK via a barrier beach, Chesil Beach, runs a compact six by three kilometres, and hosts a modest population of 13,417. Despite this small scale, the island was the venue for the London 2012 Olympic sailing events; it houses two prisons, a naval base and a castle; and its council once threatened the writer Ian McEwan with a fine for stealing some pebbles to inspire his novel On Chesil Beach. But what captured the imagination of photographer Jack Orton, and provided the focal point for his recent series, Anima, was Portland’s legacy of stone production.

Home to both functioning and disused stone quarries, Portland has provided the stone for some of the UK’s most famous buildings: St Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace and the British Museum, to name just a few. This in itself was enough for Jack; many of his projects interact with the Royal Family, investigating the “idealistic vision” often attached to them, such as his project Whispering Blooms, a series documenting Poundbury, a town built upon the principles of King Charles. With Anima, Jack wanted to understand what local people’s relationship to the stone was – those who have mined it or spent their lives surrounded by the industry. “I was interested in how the stone is this symbol of wealth, status and power,” says Jack. “I don’t believe Portland itself is widely known but, by contrast, Buckingham Palace is.” One image in the series in particular encapsulates just how revered the stone is – a photo of Wren’s stone being unveiled at Portland’s sculpture park; the imposing white obelisk stands tall against a bright blue sky, surrounded by a crowd of eager figures, phones aloft.

Jack’s first interaction with Portland happened by chance while he was studying at the Arts University Bournemouth back in 2017. He was photographing an artist in Weymouth, whose studio happened to be in the attic of his house, and, “during the shoot I noticed an island in the distance: it had a large aerial on the top of it and what looked like a prison,” Jack says. “When I asked him, he described it to me, and I knew that one day I wanted to develop a project about it.” A few months later, he visited the island and “fell in love with the place”. In May of 2023 – by chance, the same week as King Charles’ coronation – his project began, nearly six years after this encounter.

Much of Jack’s time spent on the island was spent “wandering and observing”, allowing himself to encounter random moments, and pushing him into what he describes as a “meditative state”. On a budget, Jack had managed to build an old camper car, which enabled him to stay on one of the island’s local campsites. Staying between two and five days at a time, the constant connection to the outdoors allowed him to “feel part of the island”. Naturally, as a first port of call, Jack’s first day on the island involved going to the quarries, investigating the source of what had first fascinated him. “It was a great way to meet people who lived and worked in Portland,” says Jack. “The isle has been quarried for hundreds of years and the skill often runs in local families. You’ll often find workers with last names like Stone.”

Jack wanted his images of the quarries to evoke this sense of “timelessness”, the connection between the workers and the stone that surrounds them. One of the ways he achieves this is making the most of his flash in such a unique setting. The way that the white reflective quality of the stone interacts with light creates an ethereal feeling, although slightly eerie too. “The quarries are brutal yet beautiful places,” says Jack. This sense of duality sits at the core of Anima in more ways than one. By highlighting the bond between stone, labour and human experience, Jack draws parallels between the miners and their production. “The stone, praised for its strength yet susceptible to erosion and weathering, mirrors the resilience and vulnerability of the working men on the Isle of Portland,” says Jack.

The quarries weren’t the only workplace Jack immersed himself in; one day, he also found himself on a fishing boat. “These guys work insanely hard, with a 5am start and a 5pm finish, followed by a session at the pub,” says Jack. This gruelling profession is made somewhat easier by the camaraderie Jack witnessed between the fishermen, something mirrored in the pod of dolphins that followed the boat at one point in their journey, a typical sighting for the workers, but one they still excitedly showed Jack. “It felt like an interconnected moment,” he says, “reflecting the complex relationship between the men’s lives and their environment.”

Some encounters, however, were more complicated. One image shows a handwritten sign taped meticulously to the inside of a dusty car window, reading: “I’m not going to apologise for being a white heterosexual man.” This shot stayed with Jack throughout the whole project, mainly because he “was so surprised that someone had taken the time to write and stick [it] to their car window”. Despite this initial reaction, Jack tried to take a step back and look at the scene objectively. “The sign reflects a defensiveness against perceived societal changes and debates about identity, privilege and accountability,” he says. “It speaks to the emotions men may feel in response to evolving cultural narratives around race, gender and sexuality.” In one light, Jack muses, it could be deemed as a show of vulnerability, albeit one masked in masculine aggression and mislaid anger.

For Jack, photography allows for a level of ambiguity that’s unrivalled in other media, largely down to its ability to so seamlessly blur the lines between reality and fantasy. This ambiguity makes Anima the beguiling series it is, capturing a place many in the UK have never been to or even heard of – but one of the few places in the country still defined by industrial production. He hopes it guides his audience to engage with complex (yet sometimes simplified) topics, like mental health and lives shaped by labour in a way they might not have before. Ideally, Jack adds, Anima might also sow a positive seed of change in still fixed perceptions and presentations of masculinity. “In nature, rocks and stones constantly transform, taking on new shapes and forms as they are influenced by the elements,” he says. “This shows that even the most apparently unchanging parts of our environment are subject to change, reminding us that we too must be adaptable.”