There is a glorious melancholy in the images. A crumbling petrol station, a pair of abandoned cars, a caravan that could once have been towed on myriad, jolly holidays and is now abandoned on a hilltop.
A collection of beautiful photographs taken by the Welsh landscape photographer David Wilson drawn together in a book called Peeling Paint and Rust is a hymn to decay, and a respectful nod to the power of his country’s rain and damp.
Wilson, who is based in Pembrokeshire, south-west Wales, is known for his black and white landscape photographs, but for two decades has also been taking colour pictures of structures that are – just about – withstanding the elements.
“On my travels, I kept encountering the incredible colours and textures of peeling paint and rust,” said Wilson. “I’d be on my way to a location and suddenly I’d see a bright, flaking village shopfront – or a corrugated garage or tractor graveyard and be stopped in my tracks. The colours were amazing and I had to capture them.
“Over nearly 20 years I accumulated a collection of images of this wonderful decay and one day I realised that they hung together as a whole. Together, they tell a story of rural Wales. The patina of weather-aged surfaces and rusting metal feel like works of art to me.”
Wilson said Wales wasn’t kind to bodywork and neglected buildings. “Wales has proper weather. Brutal on occasion. The kind of weather that degrades our best efforts at preservation. Paint peels and metal rusts in outdoor Wales.”
His studies of corrugated iron are particularly striking. “We’ve taken it as our own. It’s been used extensively from the 19th century for sheds, garages, houses, chapels, all manner of structures, big and small. We Welsh love this crinkly material.”
But Wilson acknowledged the sadness in the pictures. “I felt I was documenting a dislocation in the rural communities of Wales. A dying way of life. The world moves on and it seemed to have left these places and their objects behind.”
He said it was becoming difficult to find studies in decay. “People are inclined to tidy things up. Put things right. That obsession with neatness and order.”
Drew Pritchard, the antique dealer and presenter of the television show Salvage Hunters, said there was a unique beauty in dereliction and decay.
The book, which is published on Thursday, reminded Pritchard of roaming the abandoned buildings in and around the small village on the coast of north Wales where he grew up and admiring the flaking paint of a corrugated chapel roof, Stan the Butcher’s tatty shop sign and a Ford Zephyr marooned on the front yard of the local garage.
He likes the way Wilson has put “the eroded, the rust-bitten and the slowly fading away” front and centre, almost as if they were portraits of people. “Wilson’s images serve as a celebratory obituary to those too stubborn to crumble,” he said.
