GLOFA Navigation Cyf is a community organisation and registered charity. It was established in 2012 to act as custodian of the Crumlin Navigation, a derelict coalmine in the Ebbw Valley, South Wales. The charity aims to bring the 11 listed buildings still standing on the site into commercial and community use and to create a public space around them.
GLOFA operates through a membership group of volunteers (The Friends of the Navigation – FON) who, alongside practical work on the buildings and surrounding woodland, aim to raise awareness of the project and to generate external funding. In 2017, GLOFA and FON were awarded a grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund to run the Crumlin Navigation Oral History Project (OHP). The OHP aims to collect and record stories about miners and others who worked in the Crumlin Navigation as well as stories about what life was like in the area when the pit was producing.
This post records a project that GLOFA, the OHP and I undertook to engage more directly with the community of Crumlin, particularly in pursuit of enterprise opportunities.
As a way of extending GLOFA’s reach beyond its current digital platforms, we agreed to produce a newspaper that could provide an accessible, semi-permanent output to be accessed at the point where people connect with local community services (GPs’ surgeries, libraries, schools etc.).
The printed English language version, can be viewed here:
The process of collecting contributions and taking the photographs began in February and was completed in mid-May, 2018.
This was a collective effort and although we did not attempt to replicate the degree of community participation that generated the Ashington District Star, the ‘truth’ of the newspaper would be the ‘truths’ of those who contributed to it. Even so, there is still the manner of telling these truths to consider. With a ‘real’ newspaper, this might be understood in terms of editorial policy. In this case, it was more a matter of ‘style’.
We chose to be informal and conversational. In taking portrait shots of named contributors, this had to be achieved with the minimum of ‘fuss’. This meant using only natural light, not taking too much time and interrupting the daily round. The same ‘unfussy’ approach was taken in the layout of the paper which took an entirely conventional, columnar format.
But as Becker wrote in his essay ‘Aesthetics and Truth’ (1980), “Styles project moods … and moods implicitly assert both facts and judgments”. Hence, with regard to visual style in particular, we still had choices to make. One obvious choice might have been to adopt the kind of ‘grimy’ look so often associated with urban decay photography. The area lends itself well to such an approach and to the use of “ruin porn” to fetishise depopulation and dereliction and to demonstrate what has been called the ‘apocalyptic imagination’. Typically shot in damp greys, devoid of people and pretending to former photographic technologies, such images are taken to represent the collapse of capitalism, the failure of governments and the end of modernity etc. etc..
Bridges in the Rain, Crumlin 2018
The Institute and the Railway Hotel, Crumlin 2018
Alternatively, we could have chosen a more elegiac approach and a softer representation of emptiness and abandonment;
Meeting at the Workmens Institute, Crumlin 2018
The portraits could have been more humorous,
Hanna and the Red Bag, Crumlin 2018
Or more ambiguous;
Woman in the Background, Crumlin 2018
They could have been less ‘illustrative’ and more than just resemblances;
Dave on the Culvert Bridge, Crumlin 2018
Indeed, I had intended to take a much more studied approach to the portrait photography I planned for this project. I had wanted to emulate the ‘environmental photography’ of Arnold Newman, placing subjects in a controlled setting that “reflect the sitter’s life and cultural standing – usually in the context of their work or profession”. This approach simply did not fit with my subjects’ sense of how they wanted to be represented. It was too ‘staged’, too formal and too much ‘faff’. However, in the shots of the market and the festival, I had been able to take several shots of children and young people in the context of their ‘work’, namely playing, that were closer to my original intention.
While not strictly an editorial or even an aesthetic consideration, there is a sense in which the colliery site might be considered as a Foucauldian heterotopia and this has a bearing on the interpretation of the photographs selected for inclusion in the newspaper.
At its most basic, the idea of a heterotopia describes a space (or the sense of a space) that is ‘capable of juxtaposing numerous seemingly incompatible spaces in one place. [and] is at its most effective when it distorts the conventional experience of time.’ (Foucault, 1986). The colliery is a space where children now play but where once men worked and died; it is a space where festivals are held in what was once a place of exploitation; it is a space where birds nest amongst the ruins of machines that poisoned their habitat; it is a space where enterprise and self-generated economic renewal are growing out of class-motivated assaults on the conditions of labour and employment. It is a place of now as well as then and it is a place to imagine possible futures. The newspaper makes the nature of this heterotopia visible.
The production of the newspaper has been a genuine collaboration with a defined outcome and a distinctive aesthetic that indirectly constitutes a collection of images (and words) that could be said to amount to a form of documentary.
For me, it is another step towards engaging in documentary as a kind of ‘social everyday activity [rather] than a memory embalming activity, creating presence, relational situations and communications’.
Such an output, certainly over such a short period, would not have been possible without access to relatively sophisticated digital technology and the communicative potential that it provides. The production of newspapers has, until recently, been the privilege of the political and ruling classes but not of people living in small Welsh towns on the economic margins with limited social, cultural or economic means. As a minor example of ‘citizen documentary’ it will be experienced by those who made it and by those who are its object and intended subjects. And, for a tempered radical (to use Meyerson’s term slightly out of context), this is another small win.
References
Becker, H.S. (1980) ‘Aesthetics and Truth’ Society 17: 26-28
Foucault, M. (1986) ‘Of Other Spaces’, (Des Espace Autres) trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16.1 (Spring 1986), pp. 24–27.
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