news
Exhibition expo Peniche Paris
Exhibition from 1st - 7th December 2008 on the Boat Daphine, Quai de Montebello, Paris. In front of Notre Dame Cathedral.
Monday 1st of december : 18 - 22h : Opening
Tuesday 2 : 12 - 21h
Wednesday : 17 - 21 h
Thursday : 12 - 21 h
Friday : 12 - 21 h
Saturday : 12 - 17 h
Sunday : 9h30 - 13h : Closing Brunch.
Taliesin magazine
Feature in winter edition of Taliesin magazine, Wales's foremost Welsh language literary magazine published by The Academi.
Talk at Lens 4 Festival
1 November 2008
The National Library of Wales
Aberystwyth
"Robert Haines - will discuss his critically acclaimed work Once upon a time in Wales, a collection of evocative photographs taken around 1971-2 in Heolgerrig, Merthyr Tydfil as he saw the essence of his Welsh hometown being torn apart by redevelopment."
National Library of Wales
Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru
Interview in Black & White Photography magazine
Interview with Ailsa McWhinnie with many images in September edition of Black & White Photography magazine Issue 89. Published by GMC Publications
Exhibition at National Museum Wales
An exhibition of images at the National Museum Wales from July until December 2008
Talk- Saturday 12th July 15:00
St Fagans
Cardiff
CF5 6XB
029 2057 350
Rencontres Photographiques D'Arles
The book was exhibited over the summer at the RENCONTRES PHOTOGRAPHIQUES D'ARLES in the South of France as part of the publisher's selection of candidates for the Contemporary Book Award.
Exhibiting in Saint-Germain fair Paris 23.06.08
Work from the Coast series is to be exhibited in La Nuit de la Photographie contemporaine (Night of Contemporary Photography), part of the Foire Sains-Germain held at the place Saint-Sulpice in the heart of Paris. The open air fair will be on 23.06.08 from 14.00 until midnight.
Paris Posters-
Prints in Paris
Prints from the Centre Iris exhibition will be available at-
le centre iris
238 rue Saint Martin 75 003
PARIS
(along the street from the Pompidou Centre)
from May 27th until June 13th.
Les Oyats 2 40 x 50 cms gelatin silver print
Light House exhibition to tour
No details at the moment but due to the amount of interest the Light House Gallery is going to tour the "Once Upon a Time in Wales" exhibition. Venue information will be posted on this site as soon as known.
Babylon Wales review
Book review on Babylon Wales website.
"The Valleys have an enduring appeal for photographers. For decades the mining areas of south Wales have been a magnet for social realist snappers keen to capture the 'authentic' or chronicle a disappearing way of life. Robert Frank’s early-fifties sojourn in Caerau being a prime example. Whilst the quality of Frank's work is undeniable, one can’t entirely eradicate the notion that many of these outsiders turned up with the specific intention of transforming poverty into coffee table art.
Once Upon a Time in Wales is excellent and should be a strong contender for Welsh book of the year (next year). It is published by Dewi Lewis and is on sale now."
Link: Babylon Wales
BBC Wales
Interview with Mal Pope on the Roy Noble show on BBC Wales 25.04.08 about images from the Gower in the current Paris exhibition.
Link: BBC Wales
The Times newspaper
The image of Dai Edwards giving a child his first taste of beer in Heolgerrig Club is featured as the image of the day. 22.04.08
Link: Times Online
Ag magazine
8 page portfolio in Spring 2008 edition of Ag Magazine- The International Journal of Photographic Art & Practice.
Link: Ag Magazine
exhibition in Paris
Exhibition from 15th April to 3rd May at-
le centre iris
238 rue Saint Martin 75 003
(along the street from the Pompidou Centre)
Link: Charlet Photographies
Link: Centre Iris
book review by The Independent
Photography: Once upon a time in Wales
In the early 1970s, Robert Haines, as a young photographer, returned to his roots to document life in the mining communities of the Welsh Valleys. Unpublished for 35 years, the results offer a fascinating glimpse of a vanished past. Introduction by Paul Vallely
ROBERT HAINES
Hard Man Melvin - Melvin Webber, Merthyr tough guy. Not to be messed with. Lived hard and died hard after being blasted with a shotgun
Saturday, 5 April 2008
He had long shoulder-length hair and a droopy moustache. He was dressed all in denim. Very Seventies. He might have been a roadie for the Allman Brothers Band. Or – he had a mean kind of look in his eyes – a member of the Provisional IRA which had recently broken away from the mainstream of the republican movement. But Melvin Webber was not in California or the Falls Road. He was stood in an ill-painted backyard next to a couple of beer barrels in the Welsh Valleys. Merthyr hard man, the caption to the photograph read. Not to be messed with.
Or there was Mad Malcolm, who we learn was a prolific consumer of illegal chemical substances. He could have been a member of Thin Lizzy, his hair as curly wild as Phil Lynott's, a louche lace-up neck to the T-shirt he wore beneath his black leather blouson.
There were other indications of the era. The long hair of the 10-year-olds posing with a football stitched from leather panels in the old style. The TV dinner in its foil compartmentalised tray, very modern, on the table where the photographer's Aunt Rhoda is leaning dotingly over his younger brother Martin. And there was the studied self-conscious catatonia of the bored young gravedigger, with sweeping locks and bandito moustache like those of The Eagles in their Desperado phase, taking a break in their coal-warmed hut at Cefn Cemetery while his older boss, Tommy Gravedigger, sat just as quietly but with the composed stillness of the years about his set features.
That generation gap is, in its way, the subject of the exhibition of portraits currently on display at the Light House Gallery in Wolverhampton. For those signposts of the Seventies stand like lonely salients among the portraits of an extraordinary collection of characters who, the photographer Robert Haines says with hindsight, "look as if they have blown in from another century".
The hindsight may now be 20/20 but three decades ago, when these photographs were taken – between 1971 and 1972 in and around his home in the village of Heolgerrig and nearby Merthyr Tydfil – Haines already had an inkling that this world was on the cusp of extinction. Merthyr was no longer the Iron Capital of the world. And the older generation among whom Welsh was the first language, and whose men had spent their working lives underground and the rest of their time in the pub and occasionally the chapel, were the custodians of a dying era.
Haines had grown up among them but gone away to London to study photographic arts. In the vacations he wandered his childhood haunts with his camera. The middle classes and the younger generation knew about cameras. But among the older, poorer folk they were still a rarity. Take my picture, lad, they instructed. He did and they were satisfied. It made them feel important.
The resulting portraits tell of more than a century vanished. Some are timeless and universal. The steady dignity of Nan Haines, maker of the world's finest Welsh cakes. The perky comedy of Dai Passmore and his terrier on the slagheaps above the village. The muffled anguish of the old woman crying, dressed in black, as pit widows had been for generations. The bony features of Martha Lewis, paring vegetables, as her husband gazes into the hearth, demonstrating that the art of meditation is not some New Age import to these shores. An old woman shovelling stones after a flood or another knitting on the doorstep of her terraced home. Retired colliers who loved rabbiting and foxhunting, riddles and rakes, feathers and fishing.
There was a directness and an innocence to it all. No one questioned the motives of the photographer. They just made eye contact with him and sat, comfortable within their own skin, with an extraordinary dignity, each enjoying their little moment of history. Old Man Jenkins looking like an 18th-century East European rabbi. Dai Llewellyn the gurner. The barmy smile of Eddie Abrahams who didn't go out much but when he did always got blind drunk and invariably ended up lying on the floor, showing off his technique for cutting coal. Bill Baldy, with all his worldly possessions, sitting matter of factly, smiling slightly, on the bare mattress in the damp-patched room he shared with five others in his lodgings in the Castle Hotel – a "bloody doss house" as he described it, without shame or self-pity.
The generation of middle-aged folk between them and the youngsters has a dated feel about it. Their leisure too was from a bygone era, shaped by the cinema not the television. Billy Diana earned his nickname by gyrating his hips, Presley-style, when he'd had a few, serenading the women with his signature rendition of Paul Anka's 1950s classic, "Diana". Bryn Dan, a ladies' man, with his pomaded backcomb, and his succession of finely carved walking sticks, all his own work. Or Tex Jones, who lived on the Gurnos Estate but who was crazy about the Wild West, who hand-worked his own leather gunbelts and made a stool out of a cowboy saddle on which he would perch, eating cold baked beans out of a tin.
It was a hard life and these were people hardened to it. And yet they were cultured. Dick the Rock, the stone mason, wrote Welsh poetry. Art was encouraged and admired by all. At gatherings everyone without exception would sing. When Haines' grandfather died he took to the grave a score of unrecorded old Welsh songs. His great-aunt told him that her son was going to waste his life because he had become a barrister when he should have been a musician or an artist.
They have gone now, these ancient silicotic colliers. Slowly expired, their last years spent chained to an oxygen cylinder. But then so have many of the youngsters too. The Merthyr hard man, Melvin Webber, lived hard and died hard, after being blasted with a shotgun. Mad Malcolm died after hitting a lamp post at high speed on a motorbike while fleeing the police. But if the captions are all retrospective, the photographs keep something wonderful alive, the fag-ash dangling timelessly but never falling.
'Once Upon a Time in Wales' by Robert Haines is showing at the Light House Gallery, Wolverhampton, to 9 May, then touring. A book of the photographs is published by Dewi Lewis, £14.99
Link: The Independent
book review by The Guardian
Snapshots of history
Home on vacation in 1972, a photography student saw that the essence of his Welsh town was about to be torn apart by redevelopment. Now the social significance of his images has been recognised. Chris Arnot reports
Wednesday March 19 2008
The ghosts of Tommy Gravedigger, Billy Bricks and Dai Llewellyn seem to stalk the streets of Merthyr Tydfil when you walk them with photographer Robert Haines. For the record, Dai came third in the 1968 World Gurning Championships, Billy was a bricklayer locally, famous for his rendition of Tom Jones's Delilah and, as the nickname suggests, Tommy buried the dead - many of them sent to an early grave by the conditions in which they worked in the mines or the iron works.
Haines's film about Tommy Gravedigger was shown on BBC2 in 1974. But it is a series of photographs he took two years earlier that will come to light tomorrow when they are unveiled for the first time at Wolverhampton's Light House gallery. A book is to follow next month.
The exhibition and book share the same title, Once Upon a Time in Wales. If that suggests something mythically divorced from current realities, then it fits perfectly. The black and white photographs belong to the last century. But, as Haines suggests, "some of the characters featured might have wandered in from the century before that". An old woman with a black shawl over her head, weeping into a grubby handkerchief, might be waiting for news of a pit disaster in the 1870s. Mufflered men with gaunt faces peer out from under flat caps. Kettles boil on black-leaded ranges. An old man perches on his bed in a common lodging house, his worldly possessions in one bag.
This was 1972, remember. Haines, then 20, was a student of photographic arts at the University of Westminster, back in his native Merthyr for the vacation. "I could see that everything was changing," he says. "There were major redevelopment plans for areas like Georgetown and Dowlais, with their warrens of ironworkers' cottages. I wanted to record some of the characters because we'd never see their likes again. They were the unknown, the poor, with no voice."
No public voice, anyway. There was no shortage of pub performers to sing, or, in some cases, recite Welsh poetry on an epic scale. "It was a very cultured place," Haines says of his own area of Heolgerrig, a steep-sided village separated from the rest of the town by the main road to Cardiff. "The colliers believed strongly in education, which resulted in a mass exodus of sons and daughters in search of a better life."
The student photographer could hardly have known that the social changes that he was keen to record were just beginning. Still to come was the 1984-85 miners' strike and subsequent closure of the pits, the spread of shopping centres and retail parks, and the demise, in 1987, of the last foundry in town. So why have the pictures remained hidden all these years?
Haines, now 55, says: "Well, I tried them on a Welsh gallery at the time, and the curator wasn't interested." Then Haines went on to do other things, including television work and running a news agency with his former wife. "Only when I returned to fine art photography did I look at them again and think they might have some social significance," he says.
Many of the subjects have been dead for years. Haines's camera preserved them for posterity on the streets, in their homes, workplaces, social clubs or pubs. The Lamb, once the bustling hub of Merthyr, has long been demolished, and Ye Olde Express is now a Chinese restaurant, apparently closed for lunch. We peer through the pop-bottle windows, having driven down on a drizzly morning from the photographer's current home in Great Malvern, Worcestershire. He points at a red-clothed table, laid up for four, and says: "That's where I photographed the old lady weeping, the one in the black shawl." Did she not mind? "She didn't seem to. In most cases, the people in these pictures enjoyed having their photographs taken. It made them feel important."
Political radicalism
Across the road from the restaurant, Merthyr's imposing Victorian town hall stands empty, pizza boxes and empty cider cans clinging to the steps beyond padlocked iron gates. It was from this building's balcony in 1900 that Kier Hardy was proclaimed the first Independent Labour MP in Britain. Here, too, Howard Winstone waved to cheering crowds after winning the world featherweight championship. Traditions of pugilism and political radicalism were forged in the heat of the iron works and the equally harsh conditions of the pits. Down at pavement level in 2008, a billboard reveals that the old town hall has been bought for "office and bistro space".
Pictures of local boxers adorn the walls of the Station cafe, where Haines reacquaints himself with a beef and onion "steam" pie, heated up by one of the jets used by the many Italian immigrants to South Wales to put the froth in coffee before the coming of cappuccino bars. Francesco Viazzami, a sprightly octogenarian, greets the photographer warmly although he hasn't been here for years. "You wouldn't recognise the town," the old man assures him. "There's no industry any more. Where are all these people in the new houses working? Tesco, I shouldn't wonder."
"Cardiff more like," interjects his son, Mario, and he's probably right. The capital is 20 minutes away by road, and the four-bedroom and five-bedroom homes mushrooming on the hillsides above Merthyr are not paid for by supermarket wages.
It is difficult to tell how much of those hillsides is natural and how much is made up of greened-over colliery spoil. Only when we approach the lunar landscape above Dowlais can we see men in yellow jackets surveying exposed stretches of surface coal. Opencast mining is on the way back to help meet Britain's increasingly diverse energy needs.
It seems unlikely, however, that the industry will support anything like the number of jobs it did when Job Haines, the photographer's grandfather, ran small mines in the mountains around Heolgerrig and won a contract to supply the south Wales power stations.
He owned what was known as the Big House, a mansion built in 1881 by the splendidly named mine owner Christmas Evans. Robert Haines spent his first 11 years there, before the business collapsed. "The house was built on the site of a timber-framed property where poets and radical thinkers used to gather," Haines reveals. "The Chartist leader Morgan Williams was born here, and the red flag was raised here for the first time in this country."
Today, the mansion is the Heolgerrig Social Club and, like the Chinese restaurant in town, it is closed for lunch. In a window framed by chipped and peeling stonework is an advertisement for a cabaret disco offering the "definitive sound of the 80s". Then a sudden wind whips through the litter-strewn trees at the side of the car park. The ghost of Christmas Evans, perhaps? What's more certain is that the only flags unfurled by that gust are attached to a pole outside the show house on a nearby estate of new Barratt Homes.
Once Upon a Time in Wales opens at the Light House media centre, Wolverhampton, tomorrow and runs until May 9. The book is published on April 24 by Dewi Lewis, price £14.99.
Link: The Guardian
exhibition at the Lighthouse Gallery
Light House and Dewi Lewis Publishing invite you to the Book Launch & Exhibition Opening of Once Upon a Time in Wales by Robert Haines Thursday 20 March 2008, 6.30 - 8.30pm. Once Upon a Time in Wales is a collection of photographs, taken in 1971-2, recording the unique characters that inhabited the once remote village of Heolgerrig and the nearby industrial town of Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. The affectionately shot portraits are accompanied by memories, stories and local legends, which are as amusing and poignant as the images themselves. The exhibition showcases a selection of Haines' portraits, all of which are now available for the first time in the book. Robert Haines will be present at the Book Launch to sign copies and talk about his work. The book will be on sale in the Gallery during the exhibition or available from www.dewilewispublishing.com and in book stores from 20 March onwards, priced £14.99. The exhibition will continue at Light House Gallery until Friday 9 May. Light House, The Chubb Buildings, Fryer St, Wolverhampton, WV1 1HT
Refreshments will be served. Cost: free.
Light House Gallery is open Mon - Fri: 9am - 8.30pm,
Sat & Sun: 1 hour before first film screening - 8.30pm (Closed Good Friday & Bank Holiday Monday).
Admission to Light House Gallery is free.
t: 01902 716055 e: info@light-house.co.uk www.light-house.co.uk
Link: Lighthouse Gallery
Print Sales Charlet Photographies
Prints from my Coast series are now on sale on the French Charlet Photographies site. They are limited edition silver bromide prints. The images are on sale exclusively through Charlet Photographies.
If you click on the magnifying glass below the image on the right you will be able to see a much larger image.
For people who are not French fluent click on the Auteurs tab or artistes en exclusivite will bring up a list of artists where you will find my name. Clicking on my name will take you to my page. To navigate to the images for sale. To go to the sale page click on Voir et commander les Oeuvres de Robert Haines on the bottom left of the page or just click here.
There will soon be an English language version of the site.
Some of the images such as La Plage, above, were taken at Rhossili Bay on the Gower peninsular in South Wales. Iconic locations that influenced the poet Dylan Thomas, images of my childhood that remain with me.