Derrick Price looks at coalfaces, a photographic record of the Upper Afan Valley, a book by Tina Carr & Annemarie Schone
The industrial valleys of South Wales have long been sites of special interest for photographers. In the Depression of the 1930s, they were mined for images of economic, social and human dereliction. Since then many people, working from all kinds of aesthetic and social standpoints, have photographed them, so that once archetypal images of slag heaps and cloth-capped figures have given way to more diverse iconographies. For example, individual visiting photographers, such as the American Bruce Davidson, have found a kind of romantic charm in the industrial settlements, while the Ffotogallery’s Valleys Project of the 1980s was exemplary in the range of its practitioners, the diversity of styles and the variety of its themes. Nowadays, ‘documentary’ has become a problematic word for many reasons, one of which is the idea that artfully constructed images tell us more about the world than do photographs that, at least implicitly, claim to be simple records of reality. Alongside this is a sense that the photographer who drops into a place and takes off a few hours later is unlikely to illuminate the real nature of things.
Countering this kind of instant reportage has been a tradition of engaged documentary in which people from outside try to work with groups and communities in order to tell their story in detailed and complex ways. Coalfaces, by the artists Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne, is exemplary of this tradition and displays both its strengths and weaknesses. In the 1990s they worked with people living in the Upper Afan Valley in order to document their life which, since the closure of the last coal pit in 1969, has been a story of unemployment, poverty and multiple deprivations. The people there live in very small villages and, as in so many other Valleys settlements, suffer from a woeful lack of facilities and a good transport system to get to work elsewhere. In frequent visits over several years, the artists produced a number of photographs that show the everyday life of the place: people are shopping, waiting at bus stops, out for a walk, gardening. Nobody here is caught unawares in a stolen image, they are allowed to compose themselves for the camera and gaze straight out at us. This way of working avoids the voyeurism of some photographers, but hints at the ethnographic approach of travellers who lined up the natives for our inspection.
The subtitle of the book is Life After Coal in the Afon Valley and the picture we are given of the place is very much that of the village as scene of social life. If we compare them with older work, we would note the lack of any images of the chapel or the rugby pitch, once the stock shots of Valleys life, together with the pictures of pitheads, and miners with grimy faces. But these images do not depart radically from the tradition of placing people in a characteristic social setting. No-one in this book is photographed at home: we find them in the street, the ‘Stute’, the shop, the pub. Under blue skies they wander through the village or pose for a moment at the door of their house. Interspersed with these images of people are those which firmly set them in their landscape: views from the hills of the village below or images of the bulldozed sites of the old collieries.
The book is handsomely produced and accompanying it is a DVD which contains the output of a Gulbenkian-funded video project in which the artists amateurishly record some of the (rather forlorn) ways in which residents have attempted to regenerate the local economy and create new jobs. This is presumably included to demonstrate that we must see the project as community action, rather than merely frivolous image making.
The Valleys are changing and there is now a body of photographic work from within the community that will illuminate their future, but this serious look at a few small villages reminds us that the past can neither be simply erased nor easily built on.
Derrick Price is a Board member of Ffotogallery and chairs the Council of Management at Bristol’s Watershed Media Centre.
Coalfaces is published by Parthian books.
www.parthianbooks.co.uk
Countering this kind of instant reportage has been a tradition of engaged documentary in which people from outside try to work with groups and communities in order to tell their story in detailed and complex ways. Coalfaces, by the artists Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne, is exemplary of this tradition and displays both its strengths and weaknesses. In the 1990s they worked with people living in the Upper Afan Valley in order to document their life which, since the closure of the last coal pit in 1969, has been a story of unemployment, poverty and multiple deprivations. The people there live in very small villages and, as in so many other Valleys settlements, suffer from a woeful lack of facilities and a good transport system to get to work elsewhere. In frequent visits over several years, the artists produced a number of photographs that show the everyday life of the place: people are shopping, waiting at bus stops, out for a walk, gardening. Nobody here is caught unawares in a stolen image, they are allowed to compose themselves for the camera and gaze straight out at us. This way of working avoids the voyeurism of some photographers, but hints at the ethnographic approach of travellers who lined up the natives for our inspection.
The subtitle of the book is Life After Coal in the Afon Valley and the picture we are given of the place is very much that of the village as scene of social life. If we compare them with older work, we would note the lack of any images of the chapel or the rugby pitch, once the stock shots of Valleys life, together with the pictures of pitheads, and miners with grimy faces. But these images do not depart radically from the tradition of placing people in a characteristic social setting. No-one in this book is photographed at home: we find them in the street, the ‘Stute’, the shop, the pub. Under blue skies they wander through the village or pose for a moment at the door of their house. Interspersed with these images of people are those which firmly set them in their landscape: views from the hills of the village below or images of the bulldozed sites of the old collieries.
The book is handsomely produced and accompanying it is a DVD which contains the output of a Gulbenkian-funded video project in which the artists amateurishly record some of the (rather forlorn) ways in which residents have attempted to regenerate the local economy and create new jobs. This is presumably included to demonstrate that we must see the project as community action, rather than merely frivolous image making.
The Valleys are changing and there is now a body of photographic work from within the community that will illuminate their future, but this serious look at a few small villages reminds us that the past can neither be simply erased nor easily built on.
Derrick Price is a Board member of Ffotogallery and chairs the Council of Management at Bristol’s Watershed Media Centre.
Coalfaces is published by Parthian books.
www.parthianbooks.co.uk