In writing about Afon Lwyd, it is very easy to follow the thoughts of R.S. Thomas or to enter the imagined world Alexander Cordell’s Rape of the Fair Country, which is set in Blaenavon, and to do so would probably lead to another depressing, ‘coal and choirs’/ quirky characters’ photo-essay of a sort that remains common in Wales’ photographic account of itself;
To do so would be to distort my journey so far. Blaenavon in particular is not (all) monochrome, flat lit and about to surrender to the spoil heaps. This post is about reflecting the colour in the town. A later post will represent some of the people who give the place its pulse.
Some of the colour of Blaenavon is a spontaneous attempt to break with expectation;
Some of it is civically designed to resist the weather’s habit of dampening the mood of the town. The west facing wall of the leisure centre is in a colour I have seen more frequently in Santa Monica, CA and the Primary School is new and bold in steel, painted concrete and glass;
The rusty red of the iron and the grey of the spoil that might be said to be Blaenavon’s base colours can be seen equally well in the beech trees and slate wall of the town’s ‘Active Ageing Centre’.
On the advice of Andy and Tony, and somewhat counterintuitively, I attempted a little night shooting to bring even more colour into my project. This was the first time I had tried anything like this and I loved it. The technical challenges were new to me but walking around quiet streets and dark hillsides, on my own, was just perfect.
The house and street lights set the boundaries of the town and the car headlights give a sense of movement that can be so hard to capture in the day;
However, it was the youth club that really came to life in the dark, in an Edward Hopper kind of way that I had not anticipated;
Darkness, of course, can be a dangerous place and I was able to see something else of the night too:
The title of this post translates as ‘inheritance’ and is the title of a poem by Gerallt Lloyd Owen (1944-2014) that begins:
Cawsom wlad i’w chadw,
darn o dir yn dyst
ein bod wedi mynnu byw.
(Trans: We were given a country to keep, a piece of land as proof that we insisted on living.)
While sharing many of R.S Thomas’ views of the past (Troesom ein tir yn simneiau tân), Owen was perhaps less bitter and had a little more faith for the future.
I felt this too in the cold sunshine of a late autumn day and in the warmth of a sheer November evening.
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