The Swansea Gang
To begin at the beginning.
The Welsh Arts Archive, was born in 1966, as a student project at the Berkshire College of Art, Reading. A series of 120mm black and white portraits of the Swansea friends of Dylan Thomas, including:
- Ceri Richards
- Alfred Janes
- Daniel Jones
- Vernon Watkins
- Ralph ‘The Books’
The full story of The Swansea Gang I available here.
In 1967 I joined Thomson Regional Newspapers, I spent some thirty years as a press photographer. Little was added to the archive during this period, I photographed Max Boyce for the Guardian newspaper, and a series of stills of Welsh craft workers for S4c television. After returning to live in Wales, in 1996 and a meeting with the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth I resumed working seriously on the project. Some of the photographs are now in the collections of The National Library of Wales, National Museum of Wales, National Portrait Gallery, London,and the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea.
The Archive is now deposited at the Richard Burton Archive at Swansea University which was followed in 2017 by the publication of the book Pieces of a Jigsaw, funded by Parthian Books and Swansea University.
The full story of the Swansea Gang project is available here.