"It's about reaching the edges"

Over the decades, British documentary photographers have often taken us to the coast, capturing the interplay of sand, sea and sky and celebrating beaches as a place of leisure and relaxation, but also chronicling the sad decline of the traditional seaside holiday resort. Most often, the perspective is that of a visitor - but what of those who actually grow up and live there all year round?

Polly Braden's exhibition Beside The Sea, recently on display at Bristol's Arnolfini, set out to take a different approach. Coming out of her work for the Guardian's Against The Tide project, it featured portraits of an array of young people in some of the UK's most maligned coastal towns. Rather than merely taking their pictures, however, she also took their personal stories.

The exhibition certainly didn't shy away from outlining the severity of the myriad problems facing such towns. Some of these are not unique - a lack of employment and education opportunities, a dearth of community spaces, swingeing cuts to funding for youth services - but they're compounded by additional challenges, such as seasonality. The impact is most starkly evident in the so-called "mental health gap": I was staggered to read that "young people living in England's most deprived coastal areas are three times more likely to be living with an undiagnosed mental health condition than their peers inland".

The picture seems bleak. Yet Braden was aware of the dangers of confirmation bias - of looking for, finding and dwelling on the negatives. As she told the Guardian's Donna Ferguson, she didn't want to simply "tell a miserable story of deprivation" and by extension write off those who live there - quite the contrary. "I'm interested in unheard, overlooked or stereotyped stories. In this series I wanted to challenge the idea that young people are lazy and disengaged and instead show their creativity, resilience and care of their community."

Sure enough, what shone through the gloom was Braden's participants' positivity: their spirited rejection of jaundiced views, their sense of pride in and connection to places and communities so often talked down, the value they recognised in having spaces to develop and express their creativity or simply to hang out.

To achieve this required serious commitment on Braden's part: "The last thing I wanted to do was go to Blackpool, take a couple of photographs, leave and never go back again. That way everyone would feel dissatisfied and used." Consequently, Beside The Sea was fundamentally collaborative rather than exploitative, providing a visibility beyond the images. As such, it was a model example of a rich, long-term socially engaged project.

What's more, a companion exhibition upstairs granted some of the participants - a number of budding photographers from Weston-super-Mare - the opportunity to share their own work. I particularly enjoyed Siobhan Evans' Messages series, featuring scraps of text spotted in the urban environment, which made you feel as though you were trying to decipher some fiendishly complex code. Equally impressive were Braden Evans' images of wildflowers cracking concrete. Combining both resilience and beauty, widely perceived as weeds yet thriving in a hostile environment - the symbolism was obvious, but no less powerful for it.