The Other Side Of The Castle (1983)
In the early 1980s, I was travelling around Wales quite a lot, and, when I learned that 1983 had been designated by the Welsh Tourist Board as the ‘Year of the Castle’, I started to visit and photograph Welsh castles.
Using black and white film in a hand-held camera, my tactics were those of street photography, trying to catch odd, revealing juxtapositions, to see the castle in its modern, often decidedly unromantic context.
The final set of photographs – numbering about 40 in all – were exhibited in eight venues around Wales in 1983-4: Bangor, Llangollen, Builth Wells, Cardiff, Wrexham, Aberystwyth, Haverfordwest and Swansea. This slideshow contains 18 of those images.
The statement below accompanied the final showing of the work in the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, in 1984.
The other extract of text is from an essay by Rod Jones, entitled ‘Out of the Past’, in Wales: The Imagined Nation, edited by Tony Curtis and published by Poetry Wales Press, 1986.
