Valley Visitors
In 1984, the Ffotogallery in Cardiff instituted ‘The Valleys Project’, with the aim of documenting the many facets of the South Wales Valleys.
The following year, I curated the exhibition Valley Visitors for the Project. This was an anthology of photographers who had come from outside the Valleys to make pictures there, from Eugene Smith to Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Capa to Roger Palmer.
The exhibition was accompanied by this brochure with details on the work in the exhibition and an essay discussing what such outsiders had contributed to the image of the Valleys. It is, I think, now a rather evocative cultural document of photography in that place at that point in time.
in 2024, the National Museum, Cardiff mounted a large and impressive exhibition on ‘The Valleys’. Its co-curator Bronwen Colquhoun invited me to participate in a Symposium on ‘Photography in the Valleys’. I was happy to do so and talk about my memories of organising ‘Valley Visitors’. The panel is seen here against Kjell-Ake Andersson’s photographs of Bargoed in the 1970s.
Andersson’s photographs were among those discussed in my long essay ‘Bargoed to Bargoed’, published by Offline in 2024.
