Issue #006 of Offline Journal explored ‘The Photobook & Wales’ featuring a number of publications - some well known and others less so - and also sought to include several very recent photobooks and zines.
I believe many would be interested to know of other photobooks we missed or just didn’t have space to include, so I thought I’d ask readers of this Newsletter a very simple question: what is your favourite photobook from or of Wales?
Please take a minute to include your contribution below. Thanks in advance! Brian
Looking Out, Looking In - Views of Urban Windows by Alan Hale. Just before he passed away in 2018 he managed to get Monochrome Aberystwyth published, which is also excellent.
My all-time favourite book by a photographer working in or from Wales is PJG’s AGENT ORANGE: Collateral Damage in Vietnam. It’s not easy to look at, but it was and remains simply necessary (yet again) to remind future generations of the inhumanities we are all capable of and how our collective responsibility/irresponsibility can directly affect those yet to be born.
These I have the following in my collection The Welsh Desert by Tim Noble, Gap in the Hedge and Suicide Machine by Dan Wood and The Slate Sea by Paul Henry and Zed Nelson, but at the moment, my favourite is All in a day's work by David Collyer.
Hmm, well I'd be tempted to say Dark Odyssey by Philip Jones Griffiths as being the best, but as to my favourite I'm going to give it to Village School by Bryn Campbell. It's a quiet, delightful capture of life in a village school and is a real time-capsule, as well as being a tender document of all those little triumphs and tragedies that you keenly feel when you're a kid in the playground.
Can I say Vietnam, Inc by Philip Jones Griffiths? Not about Wales but at least its by a Welshman? If its one about Wales as a place then it would be a tossup between Land Of My Father by David Hurn or Suicide Machine by Dan Wood. Different approaches to the same country but both having something to say about the nature of Wales and its people.
Looking Out, Looking In - Views of Urban Windows by Alan Hale. Just before he passed away in 2018 he managed to get Monochrome Aberystwyth published, which is also excellent.
My all-time favourite book by a photographer working in or from Wales is PJG’s AGENT ORANGE: Collateral Damage in Vietnam. It’s not easy to look at, but it was and remains simply necessary (yet again) to remind future generations of the inhumanities we are all capable of and how our collective responsibility/irresponsibility can directly affect those yet to be born.
These I have the following in my collection The Welsh Desert by Tim Noble, Gap in the Hedge and Suicide Machine by Dan Wood and The Slate Sea by Paul Henry and Zed Nelson, but at the moment, my favourite is All in a day's work by David Collyer.
Gap In The Hedge by Dan Wood, I think the three linked books of this with Suicide Machine and Black Was The River You See is really very notable work
Hmm, well I'd be tempted to say Dark Odyssey by Philip Jones Griffiths as being the best, but as to my favourite I'm going to give it to Village School by Bryn Campbell. It's a quiet, delightful capture of life in a village school and is a real time-capsule, as well as being a tender document of all those little triumphs and tragedies that you keenly feel when you're a kid in the playground.
Can I say Vietnam, Inc by Philip Jones Griffiths? Not about Wales but at least its by a Welshman? If its one about Wales as a place then it would be a tossup between Land Of My Father by David Hurn or Suicide Machine by Dan Wood. Different approaches to the same country but both having something to say about the nature of Wales and its people.