THE LIFEBOAT CHRONICLES

Heroes of the high seas captured on a vintage camera

As you read this, it’s likely that a life is being saved at sea by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). Since 1824, volunteer crew and lifeguards have rescued more than 142,700 people – about 24 callouts are received each day. Jack Lowe, from Newcastle, has made it his mission to photograph all 238 RNLI crews in the UK and Ireland as part of The Lifeboat Station Project. The son of a deep sea diver, Jack was born in Aberdeen, and as a child lived on his grandfather’s boat on the Thames. Moving to Hampshire, he joined Storm Force, the RNLI’S youth division. He loved photography and, aged 12, turned his bedroom into a darkroom. After leaving university, he became a photographic assistant, then set up on his own.

For this project, launched in 2015, he taught himself a Victorian photographic technique known as wet collodion, using glass plates instead of film, and transformed a decommissioned ambulance into a mobile darkroom so he could drive across the country and develop images on the spot. He has captured 150 lifeboat stations on camera so far and hopes to visit the rest by 2024, the RNLI’S 200th anniversary. Here, he shares the stories behind some of his most epic shots…