Grinning broadly with gappy teeth, their grubby clothes consonant with the crumbling edifices around them, a gaggle of seven effervescent children pose for the camera. You wonder what instruction the photographer, Marian Delyth, gave them, to make them laugh so much, and why one of them ended up doing a Superman pose.
The premise of the “poor children in a derelict urban context” photograph is a hackneyed one. Delyth is not glib about it, but her view is both loose and lively, silly and serious, offering an image of urbanisation and poverty that is hard to read. This quality persists in 50 years of pictures – some of which are on show at Delyth’s modestly sized retrospective at Ffotogallery, Cardiff, the major attraction of Ffoto Cymru, Wales’s biennial international photography festival.
As an opener to the show, titled Fragments, the image pays a subtle tribute to Mary Dillwyn, the first female photographer working in Wales. Dillwyn is thought to have been the first person to capture a smile on camera in 1853 – a radical break with the stiff and serious poses that were Victorian convention.
Delyth’s early, unselfconscious black and white pictures of Welsh life in the 1960s and 70s in and around her home town, Aberystwyth, and later in the remote agricultural villages of Mynydd Bach, are the best work in this exhibition. Pristine gems printed by the photographer herself at home, they preserve time with attentiveness and reverence. A portrait of the furrowed face of elderly gentleman, his skin beaten to an impossible texture, presumably by the elements, rivals the stoic beauty of any Robert Frank or August Sander. A portrait of an elderly woman, meanwhile, finds the woman somewhere between labour and repose: sitting in her doorway, stockinged leg struck out, finger wagging. It seems to describe a generation, toughness and tenderness embodied, resilient and raging. A rag hangs limply on the brick wall beside her, like a flag.
In the 1980s, Delyth became fascinated with political graffiti and attended protests across Wales and England for Welsh rights, for civil rights, for peace. She photographed signs, posters and emblems of grassroots activism. Her clean, graphic lines – influenced by her training as a graphic designer – bring the urgency of these collective desires to the fore. “I want to grow up, not blow up” reads one sign held up by a child. You can see Delyth’s optimism, but seen today it’s hard to feel it.
Delyth continued to change, experimenting with colour and digital from 2000 on – represented in the second part of Fragments, but continuing to focus on remote and peripheral communities in Wales. The exhibition also shows how involved Delyth was in driving photography forward, trying to make it relevant beyond pictures hanging on walls or printed on pages. She cooked up an idea for portable exhibitions. And in 1978, she co-founded Ffotogallery, Wales’ first dedicated photography institution. Fragments is also about photography’s unique ability to bring people together. It’s astonishing how little she is known outside Welsh-speaking communities.
Delyth’s exhibition sets the tone for the wider festival – which takes place not only across Cardiff, but at venues in Swansea, Merthyr Tydfil, Penarth, Wrexham, Ruthin, and Carmarthen. Under the umbrella of its title What You See is What You Get?, the festival gives a knowing nod to the position of many women and non-binary photographers, who make up the majority of exhibitors this year. In the deconsecrated chapel of the pretty, verdant cemetery in Penarth is a new commission, Out of Sight and Out of Mind, by Welsh artist Jessie Edwards-Thomas. She creates an eerie, unsettling space to explore the precarity of parenting in a capitalist society, using photography in different ways. There’s an installation of archival photographs, texts and anatomical illustrations of the womb and foetus that recalls Carmen Winant’s work; a creepy self-portrait printed on a sheath of fabric and billowing gently like a church banner; and a series of unsettling photomontages that dump battered-looking, nightmarish dolls into found images of female factory workers.
Another unexpected account of motherhood can be found in the back of a bar in Swansea, where there is a show of three South American artists who belong to the Foto Féminas network. Argentinian artist Julieta Anaut creates hallucinogenic Jodorowsky-esque photomontages that merge the landscapes of Patagonia – where the artist is from, and where Welsh colonists arrived in 1865 – with a personal matrilineal material culture, turning objects and items of clothing that belonged to her mother and grandmother into strange, mystic symbols.
A sharp shift in tone is marked by the work of Lorena Marchetti, who climbs as high as she can on foot to take panoramas of Latin American megacities. A small selection here of cryptic and conceptual studies of São Paulo punctuate the space with a meditative thrum – Marchetti also collaborated with musician Francisco Slepoy to create a sound piece based on her recordings of the city. They lose something by being printed on gloss paper, rather than the industrial paper the artist intended.
The highlights of Swansea are Luiza Kons’ gripping vignettes. Her staged scenes of her parents, sister and herself in the rural landscapes of southern Brazil, near her grandmother’s farm, fuse her father’s childhood memories – such as the day they returned home to find their house on fire – with Kons’ own visions and experiences with ASD. It’s hardly a fond family album – the scenes are more like Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kons is a thrilling storyteller – and it’s fortunate her family are willing and able actors.
Back in Cardiff at the National Museum, Holly Davey’s In Plain Sight (Miss Jenkins? After Richard Wilson), a new commission for the festival, works by stealth not shock. Taking the place (and the gilded frame) of Richard Wilson’s 1760-65 painting Dolbadarn Castle, alongside other 18th-century masters, Davey’s work reveals the hidden history of the original painting. Thanks to advances in conservation technology, Davey found 20 X-rays of the painting in the collection archive, which show a portrait of a woman underneath Wilson’s landscape work, hidden for two centuries. Correspondence suggests the figure is Miss Jenkins, and that the portrait was never paid for and was eventually turned on its side and painted over to create Dolbadarn Castle – using the lines of Miss Jenkins’ body. Davey digitised the X-rays and created a lightbox work that brings history and painting into dialogue with the exposing light of photographic imagery, a perfect metaphor for the collision between the heavy hand of history that has attempted to paint certain bodies out of the picture, and the resilience of those disempowered bodies in spite of it. As you continue around the collection, you wonder what else might lie beneath.
It’s a tricky job to get a photo festival right. Run on shoestring budgets by small teams, they stick their neck out to sustain artists and reach audiences where big institutions and commercial galleries fail. But Ffoto Cymru 24 does it, and is dead on target.
