Huw Alden Davies comes from Tumble, a village in Carmarthenshire that developed in the late 19th century to accommodate the miners at the Great Mountain and Dynant collieries.
Mining in the area was in steep decline by the late 1950’s and the area has struggled ever since as the rural economy has also faltered. Davies has captured the continuing hollowing out of his community in his series Tumble, which I first came across in 2013 at the Cardiff International Festival of Photography. In afinebeginning, Davies wrote;
Tumble has become the focus of most my projects in recent years, and is likely to be for many years to come, I am mesmerised by it. This is the place that I grew up in. It is a place that holds my memories and experience, and it is a constant reminder of who I am. Not only has it watched me grow, I too, now watch as the social and psychological structure of my home village changes and moves towards a greater anonymity.
In Tumble, Davies’ images convey a sense of the darkness closing in on the village as it loses its identity and its purpose;
The shadows enter into the lives of those still living and working in the village;
Soon, one imagines, the emptiness will be complete;
Davies talks about Tumble being in transition and, it is true, that the area has seen harder times in the past but the odds, like the shadows, are lengthening for communities like Tumble and at one point, there may be nothing left;
There is much in Davies’ approach and his attitude that I like and which I think has influenced my current project, Afon Lwyd. I have taken a number of echoing shots, including of the chip shop, the post office and the ‘wasteland’. I cannot capture his mood nor the continuity that his distinctive, Caravaggio style of lighting produces but, leaving aside my lack of technical skill, that may also be because my project is not autobiographical and the sense of loss is not as personally felt.
In earlier (and related) projects (Fear and Hoping and Seven Point Seven), Davies also used surrounding shadow as an obvious metaphor for the dark outside the familiar and the dangers beyond the hearth but here it is more studied, more staged and, in my view, less convincing;
Although Seven Point Seven is not without warmth, the ‘1000 yard stare’ is too stylised and self-conscious to succeed as anything other than a rather close to the surface metaphor;
Although the families in these series are from Davies’ village, he is most effective when he is working even closer to home and he is perhaps best known now for his series, Prince, a humorous and deeply affectionate portrait of his eccentric father. Davies’ photographs are accompanied by a written narrative, telling stories both about and by his father, with contributions from his mother, Pearl.
According to Davies’, the project was,
“… something I started doing for myself, just taking photos of my dad and looking at him, really as an extension, or microcosm of Tumble life that I have spent years doing really.”
The familiar gathering darkness is there and so is the Gregory Crewdson-style vacant stare but, especially mediated by the text, there is also a sympathy and a very Welsh form of sideways, self-deprecating sense of humour;
I recognise that in my Afon Lwyd project, I do not have a sense of the people who live in the area through which I have travelled; or rather, I do not have anything beyond a superficial sense of them. Perhaps any depth to such an understanding is only possible to the degree demonstrated by Davies (and by Ian Macdonald) when you have truly lived where they live.
