History is often thought of as the tombstone rather than the organic material that grows in the plot. Fifty years ago in October 1966, the Welsh village of Aberfan was buried beneath a calamitous landslide of waste from coal production. One hundred and sixteen primary school children, along with twenty-eight adults, lost their lives. The classrooms of Pantglas Junior School were filled with the debris of industry and the saplings of the community. As a consequence of this disaster, coal slag heaps were transformed into parks, their pasts covered by verdant foliage.
Ron McCormick (b.1947) has lived in South Wales since 1977. A transplanted Liverpudlian, he went to Newport College of Art to take up the post of artist-in-residence but stayed to teach on the Documentary Photography course set up by David Hurn. McCormick had trained as an artist at Liverpool School of Art (1965-68), and then in London at the Royal Academy Schools (1968-71). Initially using photography to record his artworks, like many others he turned to using the medium as an art form. In the 1970s he established a reputation as a reportage photographer, fulfilling assignments for, amongst other, New Society, Time Out, and the Socialist Worker. Of greatest significance in the 1970s was McCormick’s contribution to the nascent growth of British photography galleries: in London, he was the Director of the Half Moon Gallery that later became Camerawork, and in the northeast he was the founding Director of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Side Gallery. These galleries devoted to photography reached full maturity, despite continued pressures, whilst others were felled along the road.
During the 1980s Ron McCormick was involved with the Cardiff-based gallery Ffotogallery. In 1985 he was one of the first photographers, along with Paul Reas and John Davies, to be commissioned by the gallery for the Valleys Project. McCormick’s document of the changing South Wales identified a landscape that was gradually being transformed in response to the disaster at Aberfan. McCormick had already begun his survey of this landscape in a clear, graphic manner. His draughtsman’s eye may be a result of his training as an artist which provided him with the formal drawing skills required for observation — at the Royal Academy he was awarded a prize for drawing. While there is an obvious connection to topographic photographs made by his Victorian predecessors, there is a more relevant contemporary link to the American New Topographic photographers. Professor David Alan Mellor, in his text for the exhibition publication No Such Thing As Society: Photography in Britain 1967-1987, credits McCormick as the pioneer of the ‘unsentimental gaze’ that other British landscape photographers would adopt. The difference between McCormick and his American counterparts is that they were recording a virgin landscape in the process of ruin, whereas the South Wales valleys that McCormick was photographing had already come to their end.
Ron McCormick’s exhibition How Green Was My Valley at The Kickplate Gallery in Abertillery, chronicles the process of redundancy and attempted resurgence; the show takes its name from the 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn which ends before a renewal begins. Displayed in Kickplate’s single-room gallery space are a selection of McCormick’s framed black-and-white silver gelatin prints dated from 1977 through to 1984: three panoramas in triptych format and blocks of single images. The images are largely un-peopled, apart from diminutive figures that scurry across the scene. Our attention is drawn to buildings, and the sites in which they sit. One triptych records the construction of a new road above the Six Bells Colliery in Abertillery (1984). The pit was the place of another disaster in 1960 that killed 45 men. After its closure in 1988 it became Parc Arael Griffin, now designated as a local nature reserve. Likewise, the house that towers on the corner of Abertillery’s Rhiw Parc Road (1977) has also been refaced; no longer butted with corrugated metal sheets the distinctively shaped block wears a clean coat. Another panorama triptych picks out the bare remains of The British Iron Works in Abersychan (1984), already closed by the late nineteenth century. In the top row of a grid of nine photographs, a snow-covered hulk broods over Blaenavon (1978). This is the location of the Big Pit National Coal Museum that is dedicated to preserving the heritage of coal mining in Wales. Opened in 1980, the museum stands as the new industry, an actual tombstone for the miners that worked there.
The valleys are green once more but growth is taking a different path. The Kickplate Gallery is part of this community’s regeneration, yet also takes its place alongside Cardiff’s Third Floor Gallery (est. 2010) and North Wales’ Oriel Colwyn (est. 2011) in the current flowering of photography galleries in Wales. It is appropriate then that work by Ron McCormick plays its part, not only by showing what lies beneath the greened landscape but also by connecting the new photography space to its siblings. The history of photography in Britain now has its roots firmly planted in the visual arts. Linking the present to its past has urgency considering previous neglect; it is time to look again at these pictures and the photographers that made them. The saplings of Aberfan have left their mark by their absence. A gap exists. A gaping hole is their tombstone. Remembering their story sites them in a renewed narrative. Histories have continuity; they are not so easy to ignore.
– Reviewed by Stephen Clarke
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Ron McCormick: How Green Was My Valley was exhibited 03.09.16 – 01.10.16 at The Kickplate Gallery, 26 Church Street, Abertillery, NP13 1DB South Wales
