Wedding Photographer St Ives — Tate St Ives, Porthmeor Beach and the Hepworth Sculpture Garden
St Ives is England’s most concentrated centre of British modern art and one of its most dramatically beautiful harbour towns — a Cornish fishing port whose extraordinary quality of light (the result of the town’s peninsula position with the Atlantic sea glare from three sides of the compass) drew artists from the 1880s onwards and created the St Ives School of British modernism, centred on the Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden, the Bernard Leach Pottery and the Tate St Ives gallery opened in 1993 in the former gas works above Porthmeor Beach. For St Ives wedding photography, the town’s combination of Porthmeor Beach’s Atlantic-facing surf strand, Porthminster Beach’s sheltered south-facing bay, the harbour’s working fishing boats and the Tate’s clifftop terrace provide a portrait landscape of exceptional Cornish coastal quality with a specifically modernist and artistic cultural context unique in England.
The Hepworth Garden, Tate St Ives and the Island
The Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden — the garden and studio of the St Ives School’s greatest sculptor, preserved by the Tate in Trewyn Studio where Hepworth lived and worked from 1949 until her death in 1975, with the outdoor sculpture in the sub-tropical garden and the indoor studio spaces exactly as Hepworth left them — provides a specific garden portrait setting of British abstract sculpture in a sub-tropical garden of considerable intimacy. The Tate St Ives’ curved white building above Porthmeor Beach — Evans & Shalev’s 1993 building, with the gallery’s clifftop terrace above the beach and the rooftop views of the Atlantic — provides an architectural clifftop portrait backdrop. The Island (St Ives Head) — the rocky peninsula behind the lifeboat station with St Nicholas Chapel on the summit — provides a headland portrait setting above the harbour.
Porthmeor Beach, Porthminster and the Working Harbour
Porthmeor Beach — the broad Atlantic-facing strand below the Tate and above the artists’ studios, with the full Atlantic westerly swell arriving on the beach and the evening light’s dramatic golden angle — provides the primary sunset and golden-hour portrait beach setting of St Ives’ three beaches: the largest, the most dramatically lit in the evening and the most architecturally backed. Porthminster Beach — the south-facing sheltered bay below the station, with the Porthminster Café’s terrace above the sand and the Caribbean-quality calm water in summer settling — provides the calmer, more sheltered and more Mediterranean-feeling St Ives portrait beach. The working harbour — the granite quays, the lobster pots, the fishing boats at low water and the warren of narrow streets behind the harbour front — provides a portrait setting of Cornish working fishing port character.