A Digital Drove – The Search for John Thomas
PhD Research Project:
John Thomas was a renowned social photographer in his day, working out of his main studio in Liverpool, he made repeated trips back into Wales, the land of his birth, in a career that lasted over thirty years (1863 to 1899), to photograph its people, places, architecture, infrastructure, events, or any celebrated individuals of renown. These were commercial undertakings, and at least at the beginning the photographs were taken to make prints to sell for a profit, and in this venture, he was very successful.
The equipment he used was limiting, it was heavy and cumbersome (often requiring a donkey and cart to move), he had to develop his photographic plates within 15 minutes of taking the photograph, and the subjects would have to remain absolutely still whilst the photograph was being taken. The Victorian and 19th century rural Welsh social conventions limited the types of photographs that would be acceptable and because of this and all the above-mentioned factors his photographic career begins in a creatively limited way.
However, despite his technical and social limitations John Thomas was a pioneer working in an early photographic period, in parts of rural Britain (Wales and the Welsh border counties of England) where few, if any, photographers had previously visited. As such many of the images that he made are the first photographic records that we have in many locations. He also produced a staggering number of commercial portraits and particularly those completed at village fairs or in group settings act as important social documents. Finally, over time Thomas expanded the scope of his work to include an increasing array of social scenes, exhibiting a greater degree of creative freedom and technical skill. These images are amongst his most important and rememberable photographs showing rural Welsh life at the end of the 19th century. At the end of his life Welsh newspaper Y Cymro reported that ‘There was probably no better-known character through north or south Wales a few years ago, than Mr Thomas’ (I.M. Jones 42)
My project’s aim though was not to focus on the highlights of Thomas’s photographic archive, or to review or summarise his life’s work in a historical narrative (there are already good books doing this). Nor am I looking to recreate his methodology or photographic techniques through historical experimentation. Rather my aim been to bring to life the spirt of John Thomas’s photographic exploration through the use of contemporary digital fine art photography. To rediscover the landscape of Wales and the Welsh borders, both the historical context, and that history’s relationship to the modern landscape.
These aims have crystalised in my mind as the result of practical application. A process started by the story that John Thomas himself tells in his memoirs, of how when he was just 15 years old, he walked from the village of Cellan (which is near the market town of Lampeter in Ceredigion) to Newtown in Powys and then on by canal and train to Liverpool. A journey of 100 miles as the crow flies, and about 140 miles by road. This journey Thomas embellishes in his telling for he does it in extra quick time and in terrible weather conditions. The route he took was to pass through much of the countryside that he would later photograph, and there is a distinct feeling in his writing that he may have later regretted not being able to photograph the journey (for he is but a boy in 1853, and photography was not yet accessible for most people). He heads to Liverpool to find his fortune and make a new life for himself, crossing out of a rural Wales where traditionally people had rarely left their community or travelled far.
At once I saw the potential of retracing his steps with my camera. I had considered the project prior to a house move, but it was subsequently just by chance that I happened to move to the parish of Cellan not far from where John Thomas had grown up. Reading the above account and realising the link after moving, I decided that this was a journey that I had to take (for it felt as if it was fate). The realisation that I had the opportunity to photograph the one journey that John Thomas had never been able to. I hope that by placing myself at the same points that Thomas visited that I could rediscover something of this photographer, the landscape that he travelled through, how this landscape may or may not have changed in the intervening century and a half, and how he may have seen the relationship between Wales and Liverpool, between city and rural life.
As I write this, I am halfway through the process of walking and recording my journey, yet I have already begun to uncover important points in this story.
- My photography has exposed the relationships, tensions, and dichotomies in the landscape between the traditional and the contemporary, the past and the present, and the rural and urban.
- The work has also been able to reflect on Thomas’s own cognitive dissonance between his desire to photograph modern, often secular, developing Wales, whilst surrounded by a canon of traditional thought, religious theology, and heritage.
- In parts the work has highlighted issues of accessibility, migration, and immigration.
During this process it has sometimes felt as if I have moved away from my original central research question. Where I had wanted to look at how digital photography could be used to bring museum artefacts to life by embellishing their narrative. But it does now feel as if I have moved full circle. The artefact of John Thomas’s memoirs, and his written narrative has led me to undertake this project. To use digital photography to uncover and newly realise different aspects of Thomas’s work and story.
I have found that some parts of his narrative cannot have been totally accurate. One example is that the time allotted to the journey in the narrative does not add up – there is likely to be at least one missing day in his account of events. But this is not so important as the ability of my own journey to discover truths in the landscape (it is worth remembering he was recounting these events over the space of forty years). Through carrying out the ‘walkphoto’ process I have rediscovered hidden landscapes (the open plains above Afon Claerwen and the secret natural tunnels of the Montgomery Canal) – that though not unknown – are I think rarely photographed and certainly not in a way that links them together again in a continuous narrative. This continuous narrative was known to our ancestors, as hunter-gatherers, later in the form of religious or secular pilgrimages, animal droves, the gathering of animals and produce at market, in the travels of the Romani people / Roma, travelling salesmen, merchants, tinkers (or for that matter travelling photographers), carnivals or fairs. Only recently has it been lost. The coming of the trains, the Enclosure Act, national markets, international trade, and the rise of the automotive experience all helped separate us from a narrative that is only possible to truly view through a landscape walked. The camera is revealing that landscape, the stark comparisons that lie within it, the points where history butts up against now.
John Thomas lived at interesting juncture in this history, he was born into a world that was rooted in its landscape, yet travelled out of it, seeing canal boats and trains for the first time on that first journey. He returned to Wales numerous times and witnessed the spread of the new transport networks. He celebrated the improvements to society that they brought, yet there is an increasing sense of nostalgia visible in his later work. Despite all the changes that my camera can see, these issues are as vivid today as they were at the end of the 19th century.
Reference:
Jones, Iwan Meical, ‘Hen Ffordd Cymreig o Fyw / A Welsh Way of Life – Ffotograffau John Thomas Photographs’ pp. 42-43, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales, 2008