Ben Woolhead takes in, and expands on, a recent panel discussion at Cardiff’s National Museum on how photographers have shaped the wider image of south Wales’ Valleys region, with particular reference to Ffotogallery’s Valleys Project, 40 years since it was established.
Over the years, the Valleys have proved to be a honeypot for some of the world’s foremost photographers. W. Eugene Smith, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, Josef Koudelka, Edith Tudor-Hart and her brother Wolfgang Suschitzky are among those who have images on display as part of National Museum Cardiff’s multimedia exhibition The Valleys. And, as Ian Walker reveals during Photography And The Valleys, a late-November afternoon panel discussion, it was arguably the most famous British photographer of all who played a part in drawing attention to Ffotogallery’s Valleys Project, to which the current show is indebted.
When Ffotogallery put on an exhibition of David Bailey’s work in the mid-1980s, then director Sue Beardmore speculatively invited him to contribute to the fledgling project. Bailey – renowned for his fashion portraiture, and strongly associated with 1960s London – was seeking a more worthy sideline away from his commercial work, and so readily agreed. His name drew the crowds to the subsequent exhibition, which Ffotogallery made sure to use as an opportunity to promote the work of photographers based closer to home.
This episode and Walker’s telling of it encapsulate what turn out to be the afternoon’s two key and interrelated themes: insiders versus outsiders, and the importance of motivation. Bailey was very much an outsider (a “Valleys visitor”, to use Walker’s term), primarily motivated by self-interest; by his own admission, he’d pitch up, take some pictures and head back to London.
Given the Valleys Project had been initially conceived as a means of more closely connecting the organisation to its locality and community, Bailey’s participation was contentious, and provoked fierce debates within Ffotogallery. However, Walker acknowledges, Beardmore was proved right: the invitation was a canny move in helping to raise the profile of the project, and Ffotogallery itself.
Of course, Bailey is far from being the only “Valleys visitor”. Of the other aforementioned names, Smith, Frank, Davidson, Koudelka and Suschitzky were all only passing through – though Tudor-Hart moved to the Rhondda after marrying a local doctor. Philip Jones Griffiths and David Hurn were born in Wales, but neither can be considered Valleys insiders – even if the latter has now staged two separate photo exhibitions at Ynyshir’s Workers Gallery.
The afternoon’s panel acknowledge that the insider/outsider debate continues to resonate, but agree with attendee Walter Waygood (an original contributor to the Valleys Project) that ultimately, the motivation behind photographs is a more critical factor than the photographer’s precise positionality. Were the pictures taken with commitment and sincerity, or are they patronising and exploitative, made for mercenary ends?
Panellist Paul Cabuts urges us to consider the intended audience in particular. For instance, Smith may have had left-wing sympathies, but his famous photograph Three Generations Of Welsh Miners was taken for the right-leaning US publication Life. Oral testimony from the youngest of those miners, Vernon Harding, has confirmed that – contrary to Smith’s claims – the picture was actually carefully staged rather than serendipitously captured. As such, it’s subtly undermined and mocked by its positioning on the gallery walls alongside It’s Called Fashion (Look It Up) – one of the openly choreographed images from Clémentine Schneidermann’s striking collaboration with Valleys-born stylist Charlotte James. It depicts five preteen girls dressed like widows, their faces as pale as those of the miners are blackened.
While outsiders can potentially offer a fresh perspective on the familiar, they can also fall into reiterating tired and misrepresentative tropes. Cabuts ventures that by the 1990s, photography of the Valleys had become stale, and so hails what he sees as the subsequent “biographical” turn taken by those who have had the courage to look at and do things differently, by bringing themselves into their work and abandoning black and white in favour of colour.
He cites Schneidermann and Dan Wood as prime examples, as well as Machen-born fellow panellist David Barnes – whose practice of working closely over a long period of time with the same people is engaged rather than exploitative, and makes him the very opposite of a “Valleys visitor”. Cabuts’ own contributions to the exhibition, from his series End Of The Row, also present a literal alternative angle, depicting the gable walls rather than the fronts of the terraced houses for which the Valleys are renowned.
A desire to change the record and offer a diversity of representations of the Valleys stands behind the exhibition as a whole. Another panellist, curator Bronwen Colquhoun, explains how prior consultation with local community groups helped to establish two guiding principles: the exhibition should avoid dwelling too much on the area’s industrial past, and it should be positive and joyous rather than downbeat.
This explains, for instance, why an entire wall of the first gallery space is devoted to photographs from Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne’s Coalfaces, a project produced in genuine collaboration with local people in the Afan Valley in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These remarkable images are belatedly receiving the exposure they deserve; Carr and Schöne feel their work and its ethos is finally being understood and respected, Colquhoun says.
And they aren’t the only ones to have responded enthusiastically to the exhibition. Much as when David Hurn’s Ynyshir: 25 Miles enjoyed a residency at the Workers and then went on tour in the local area, the photographs and other artworks on display have struck many a personal chord, stirring memories and strong emotions for some 90,000 visitors – a record number for any one exhibition here. Colquhoun highlights one attendee, a bus driver who never normally visited galleries but in this case had recognised people in the photographs from his route through the Rhondda.
From buses to trains. Barnes – in his capacity as custodian of/evangelist for the Documentary Photography course founded by Hurn at the Newport College Of Art and now run at the University Of South Wales – talks about helping to establish the Station To Station project, which sees students travelling on Valleys lines and documenting what they discover along the way. Over the years, alumni of the course such as Schneidermann have been instrumental in representing the area for the wider world. It’s reassuring to know that whatever the future holds for the Valleys – after industrialisation and then deindustrialisation – the next generation of photographers will be on hand to capture it.
The Valleys exhibition is at the National Museum Cardiff until Sun 5 Jan. Admission: FREE. Info: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD
