Picture This 27 January 2008

I am going to use photographs from the 40s and 50s to help get the period detail right when I embark on my project.

Bert Hardy was working in these decades and captures some vivid images of the black community in Tiger Bay/Butetown.

He had a rapport with these people - a white, working class, cockney born into poverty around the Elephant and Castle. He had no political agenda but shows how life was lived in a place cut off from the rest of the city of Cardiff. A.L.Lloyd, a contemporary and friend of Bert says a lot about Tiger Bay and its difference:

" -----the area is a slender finger jutting into the sea, bounded on one side by the railway tracks and on the other by the canal, and choked at the top end, the town end, by a stout, black viaduct that seals off the district as surely as if it was a tall iron gate guarded by a white man in blue."

Bert Hardy has done a service to history but photography they say cannot be taken at face value as hard evidence. I am not sure what my perspective is on that but I relate to this quote from Henri Carter Bresson, taken from his book 'The Decisive Moment' (1952):

" We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

"We cannot develop and print a memory."

My job will be to try to recreate something - albeit as a work of fiction drawing, in part, on my mother's memories of Cardiff in the Second World War. In doing so I will have to recollect my memories of her stories but I will also seek out the stories of others who came or come from a different part of the city, a place cut off from the rest of the city but not from history and the events which shaped the lives of everyone living there.