TIME AND REMAINS OF PALESTINE
THAT STILL REMAINS / WHEN THE TIME COMES
our selection of work by photographer
James Morris
8 June 2019 - 5 October 2019

When he began the work for Time and Remains of Palestine, James Morris was particularly drawn to the ruins of the many depopulated and deserted villages there, comparable to the remains that might be found in the Welsh hills, or Greece or Italy. The land has been altered not only by the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but by the scale of building work for housing and security designed to attract Jewish settlers. James attempts to excavate those changes. Traces of former Palestinian habitations in a land re-imagined by the dominant Israeli culture.

The origins of these photographs lie in a pine forest, walked through at the start of my first visit to Israel when I came across the unexplained crumbling walls of seemingly ancient structures, a small stream running by . . . a plaque announced it as "an oasis," "a recreation area, a place of water, of hope, of peace, of vision.” Later that day I found a film online depicting a recent visit to the same location by Israeli Palestinian citizens. Elderly men recalled that as children those remains had been their village, the terraces their fields, the water their spring; they had been made internal refugees by the 1948 war during what they called their ‘Nakba’; their village flattened, their right of return refused, a planned forest of imported pines veiling their former world. Such divergent interpretations of place were a potent introduction to the dislocation in their land.

collection 1: Rituals of Intimacy
John Blakemore
Peter Cattrell
Pete Davis
Marian Delyth
Aled Rhys Hughes

This was our first Collection show, in which we will display annually a selection of work for sale by photographers we represent. This collection looked at the practice and process of film photography.

It was a unique opportunity to see photographs spanning 50 years, from John Blakemore's Sunrise, made in 1968 in North Wales, his first Welsh landscape, to Peter Cattrell's 2018 work around Machynlleth and Borth. It is a chance for the photography enthusiast and collector to come face to face with photographs by acknowledged masters who are still using film.
Exhibition prints are the very best work the photographer can achieve, the result of many years of dedicated study and personal exploration of the medium.

mwy o
THE VALLEYS
Ffotograffau gan
ANTHONY STOKES

more from The Valleys
photographs by
ANTHONY STOKES

4 May - 22 September 2018

Just over ten years ago, photographer Anthony Stokes had his Valleys photographs exhibited inWales for the first time and a book, The Valleys, with an introduction by Iain Sinclair published by Seren. The work is beautiful, sad and funny.

If there is a category for straight documentary urban photography that doubles as spare, abstract colour work, with a sense of humour and delicacy, that’s where you would place Tony Stokes’s photography. No single word or term will suffice. He’s a complex character as well, an unusual mix in himself – apparently quite English, but with Welsh parents and aunts. In 2000 he moved from London to a terraced house in Ogmore Vale in South Wales and in 2016 we discovered for ourselves that the valleys photographer was the same person as the Tony Stokes who had galleries in London from the ‘70s and was Fay Godwin’s agent. That’s how we got to know him.
Geoff Young, writing in the exhibition brochure, More From The Valleys / Mwy o The Valleys, FFotogaleri y Gofeb

See writing about photographs in this exhibition here

Lest the Land Should Lose its Voice
Photographs by Aled Rhys Hughes & Peter Cattrell

an exploration of landscapes from the battlefields of WW1
at Mametz and The Somme, as they lie now
21 November 2017 to 21 March 2018

Our first exhibition at ffotogaleri y gofeb featured two outstanding photographers, with a shared interest in revisiting the battlefields of WWI.

How does a photographer portray events which took place many decades before? Convey the feeling of being somewhere and sensing what happened there, through taking photographs?  Particularly of a location that once witnessed indescribable horrors, such as part of the First World War landscape of France, where the battle of the Somme was fought. 

The photographer will sense some of the reality of war, stand in a place that will forever be the very place where ordinary men once fought, struggled and died and know that a photograph will show that place, even somehow contain a part of it. 

The photograph viewed, away from the place it originated, might lose some of that content.  Although a print made from a negative will be physically, indexically, linked, that is not a visible connection.  That can only be made in the viewer's mind, by an effort of will, to transpose prior knowledge onto the scene. Photography does allow this; we are used to looking at places where we have never been, that have background connotations.  It is the extreme emotion that a warring landscape evokes that might be harder to sense in a photograph.

Aled Rhys Hughes and Peter Cattrell respond in different ways.  Aled stands back from the scene, a space in front of him which he does not enter, but the potential to do so is there, with his large scale prints recreating the menace that the ground ahead must have projected at the time. He looks at the space in front of him or that between the 2 opposing lines of soldiers – challenging and frightening spaces that we will struggle to appreciate now, but might be felt still in Mametz wood.

Peter puts himself and us in the scene, he wants to walk on the same ground, retrace the steps of the soldiers, relatives he has got to know through his research and his walking with his camera. He wants to look at what they looked at.

In their different ways, Aled and Peter each strive to record the changes that take place in the landscape.  Their work and the work of other photographers, pays tribute and helps to illustrate descriptions of the events a hundred years ago, ensuring that the visceral nature of that part of our history still remains. 

The landscape remembers, for the generations that follow, either by gradually revealing what was once buried, expelling the past into the present or by still showing the topographical features that remain, even after a century has passed.  Nature has reclaimed the wreckage, but its voice is still to be heard through the work of these photographers.

Aled Rhys Hughes, Mametz

Aled has been visiting Mametz Wood, the site of the most significant battle in World War I for Welsh troops, for over five years. The striking contemporary photographs Hughes has taken over this period have been published in Mametz, to mark the centenary of the Battle of Mametz Wood.

What inspired Hughes to keep returning to this landscape? 
‘Does a place retain some sort of memory of what’s happened there – over the years or over the centuries? It's very clear to me that in Mametz Wood... there is a memory there of what’s happened a hundred years ago.’ – Aled Rhys Hughes