Charles March: Sandscript

4 Nov 2025-16 Jan 2026

Overview

Hamiltons Gallery, London presents new work by British photographer Charles March. Titled Sandscript, the exhibition showcases a body of work that continues March’s journey into abstraction, through images captured along the shoreline.

The exhibition presents a new series of minimalist photographs, each the result of patient observation. March captures shadows, lines and textures that become meditations on the natural world, where sea grass, fragments and fleeting marks on sand appear as calligraphic inscriptions, soon erased by the tide or blown away by the wind. Moving towards abstraction, the works recall the fluid brushwork of Chinese ink painting. Rather than expansive landscapes, they are intimate studies, closer to sketches or drawings. 

Movement has long been central to March’s practice, with earlier abstract works created through the motion of the camera itself. In Sandscript, however, the camera remains still, and it is the subject matter that shifts, grasses bend in the wind, moving the sand, while fragments of detritus disappear almost as quickly as they appear.

Charles March says, “I want my pictures to create an impression, a feeling, by holding onto a moment in nature that would otherwise be lost as soon as it appears.”

Edith Devaney, curatorial advisor says, “Charles March’s works have always contained a strong and immediately recognisable emotional content, but in the intriguing images in this exhibition, with their focus on a deliberately transient and abstracted subject, he invites a more complex reading.”

March’s career as a photographer spans five decades. He began taking photographs at the age of twelve and, having left school at sixteen, started his professional career as an apprentice to film director Stanley Kubrick, working on Barry Lyndon. He then travelled to East Africa, working as a documentary photographer and contributing photo stories to numerous magazines, before establishing himself in the 1980s as one of Britain’s leading still-life and advertising photographers under the name Charles Settrington. 

In the 1990s, March returned to his family’s Goodwood estate in West Sussex but always continued his photography. Since his first public exhibition Nature Translated in 2012, curated by Edward Lucie-Smith, March has exhibited internationally at the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, the Moscow Photography Biennale, Somerset House in London, Venus over Manhattan in New York, Hamiltons Gallery in London, Venus over Los Angeles, and Galleria del Cembalo in the Borghese Palace, Rome. His work is held in both private and public collections.

March will donate his proceeds from the exhibition to The King’s Trust International’s 10th anniversary campaign, Generation Potential.