Texts

Book published by University of Wales Press, 2012
Creative Photography and Wales explores the development of practices within photography undertaken in and about the south Wales Valleys during the second half of the twentieth century. The publication is the first significant review of the history of photography in this specific field, and is of potential interest to an international audience as it explores the work of one of the most significant photographers of the twentieth century. ...more

Exhibition text for A Turning Tide - Aled Rhys Hughes - April 2011.
Some of the earliest photographs taken in Wales were of the sea. Whilst mastering the brand new technology of photography in the nineteenth century, John Dillwyn Llewellyn set about photographing ships at Swansea’s docks at a time when the sea was a ‘super-highway’ for transport, trade and knowledge. In 1855 Llewellyn was awarded a silver medal of honour at the Exposition Universelle Paris for four photographs taken on the theme of motion, including a photograph that captured incoming waves at Three Cliffs Bay on the Gower Peninsular. ...more

Article featured in Blown Magazine, Autumn 2010
I hate the photograph of three miners – or at least I used to. I guess this was because growing up in the Rhondda in the 1970s it was rare to see grimy miners on the street, particularly on streets as gloomy as those in the photograph. I first saw the photograph in my uncle’s collection of photo-books in a book called The Art of Photography. I used to get taken to visit my aunt and uncle on some Sundays as a treat – they lived in Barry near the island. What I didn’t realise until decades later was that we had to drive along one of the streets in the photograph to get there. ...more

A paper presented at Emerging Landscapes, a conference organized by the University of Westminster, London. June 2010.
This paper considers the relationship between forests, photography and Wales. In doing so it explores the possibility that fir trees and forests might provide Wales with the appropriate monuments and landscapes to symbolize the nation in the twenty-first century. The cultural dynamics enabling national symbols to emerge in Wales is explored. Consideration is given to whether such cultural processes can be sustained when notions of identity are increasingly fluid. Consideration is also given to the role of photography in these processes. ...more

An exhibition review published in Planet, Spring 2010, Issue 198.
Ffotogallery’s recent exhibition and publication The Silent Village presented a fascinating exploration of atrocity, memory and place. Curated by Russell Roberts of the University of Wales, Newport, The Silent Village not only offered an opportunity to revisit the work of filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, but also provided a rich platform for contemporary responses from artists Peter Finnemore and Paulo Ventura, and writer Rachel Trezise. ...more

Article published in Planet, Autumn 2009, Issue 196
Photography has played a role in Wales since its invention in the 1830s when its key figure William Henry Fox Talbot, along with his family and friends, made some of the earliest ever photographs in and around Swansea and Margam. This summer, three concurrent exhibitions, two at National Museum Cardiff and one at Ffotogallery, offered an opportunity for Paul Cabuts to reflect on the development and growth of the medium over the last forty years. ...more

A presentation at the Wales Millennium Centre with Aled Rhys Hughes, November 2009.
It is better to start by looking at other people’s photographs when talking about my own. This is a photograph of the Welsh actor Stanley Baker ‘At the Brynffynon Inn – Llanwonno – on the occasion of filming ‘Zulu’’. Taken by an un-credited photographer, this ‘trophy’ image was published in Pontypridd the Old Urban Wards, one of the many books that became increasingly available in the 1980s and 1990s exploring local areas through old photographs. ...more

A paper presented at Photography, Archive & Memory, a symposium organized by Roehampton University, London.
If one were asked to conjure up a mental image of the South Wales Valleys it would almost certainly feature some of the characteristics contained within the photograph of three miners taken by the great ‘humanist’ photographer Eugene Smith in 1950. This image became a key element of my larger research study in which I considered the development of the photographic arts relating to the Valleys. ...more

A paper presented at the Welsh Institute for Research in Art & Design's 1st National Symposium for Emerging Art & Design Practitioners.
As a photographic practitioner I undertook a PhD study that would involve literature reviews, examinations of photographic collections and archives, collaborations with other researchers and practitioners, and the production of new photographic works. It is the case that in establishing the questions to be addressed in the study, the limited existing scholarship in the field of photography’s relationship to the South Wales Valleys became a key factor structuring the investigation. ...more

A paper presented at the National Library of Wales' 4th Annual Festival of Documentary Photography in Wales
In 1839 the announcement of photography coincided with the opening of the Treherbert to Cardiff railway line to service the rapidly expanding coal industry in the Rhondda. By the 1850’s the distribution of coal extended to the building of a railway line between the Valleys of south Wales and the industrial Midlands. This significant project required a viaduct that crossed the valley at Crumlin. ...more

Catalogue text published to coincide with the Zobole Cabuts exhibition 2006
The tenet driving me to make my work has been the slippage between my experience of growing up in the Rhondda in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the way it has been represented by various media including writing, film and photography. The work I undertake is, in part, produced to reveal the structures underpinning the media surfaces that have become the prevailing windows on this particular world. ...more

Article published in Ffotocopy, Winter 2005
The Valleys of South Wales has been one of the most photographed areas in the world. Images of the region by important figures in photography such as Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith and Robert Frank have either been published or exhibited in many of the most prestigious magazines and museums. Robert Frank’s photographs taken in Caerau near Maesteg in 1953 formed part of his touring exhibition shown at Tate Modern early in 2005. This exhibition offers an example of how such images can re-emerge in today’s contemporary photographic contexts. ...more

Article published in Source Magazine - Summer 2003 Issue 35
The perception of the south Wales Valleys is formed, in part, by the photography that was undertaken there in the first half of the twentieth Century. The most influential photographs were those published in the mass media magazines of the day and those, which have since been legitimised through being collected, re-published and exhibited by academics and intellectuals working within the boundaries of art theory and criticism. ...more

Article published in Planet, Winter 2001, Issue 150
Snapshots, family photos, photographs in newspapers and magazines and on advertising hoardings form a powerful visual backdrop to our lives. Indeed, it is photography's hybrid character that makes it so tantalisingly interesting and allows it to remain one of the most accessible and popular art forms. Most of us will have, at some time, taken photographs to record happy or memorable events. ...more

Notes (unpublished), Summer 2010
Paul Cabuts’ Photoworks are a work-in-progress and as such continue to develop and expand. The work is shaped by a sense of place, photo-history, developments in thinking around photography, and are also, in many ways, self-referential. These notes provide an outline of the framework within which the Photoworks develop. As a work-in-progress it is an exploration of ideas that may not necessarily be resolved or fully expressed. It is however possible to provide a sketch of the key components of this framework which are described here as Cultural Resistance, Seriality, Iconography and Unfixed Documents. The thread that runs through these components is a sense of place. ...more