Structures of Feeling: Geoff Charles
The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth is proud to be a part of Diffusion – Cardiff International Festival of Photography between 1 and 31 of May 2013.
Diffusion is a month long festival of exhibitions, discussions, screenings, performances, events and celebrations in both physical and virtual spaces and places.
An exhibition of the work of Geoff Charles the photojournalist whose contribution to a variety of Welsh newspapers and magazines was extensive will be shown at the Tramshed, Clare Road, Grangetown.
The exhibition has been curated by Peter Finnemore and Russell Roberts.
Throughout the North and the Borders he documented the fabric of daily life as well as the traditions and modernisation of Wales. Accidents, fashion, farming, Eisteddfodau, civic openings, industry, cars, travel, protest and war figure in what constitutes a dense visual encounter with place and history.
The exhibition draws on the collection of the National Library of Wales to create new frames of reference for Charles’ press photographs. Removed from their original context as half-tone illustrations and from the collection that usually defines them, these images with their shift in scale and presentation can still be very direct statements about the world but also mysterious fragments of it.
Diffusion 2013 examines these cultural shifts and different approaches to artistic production, presentation and distribution. We look at the relationship in photographic art between traditional and new hybrid forms and their place within contemporary visual culture. Diffusion 2013 offers a space for artists, cultural agents and audiences to share experience and creative endeavour, to begin to make sense of a world where almost anyone can and will become a photographer and distribute their images within online communities – a society in which our experience of time and space has dramatically changed.
Diffusion 2013 is staged in Cardiff, Wales’ capital, a city that in recent years has undergone major economic and social transformation. The festival uses both traditional and new media to create a strong visual presence across existing venues and found spaces and through various interventions in the public realm. We encourage visitors and residents alike to navigate Cardiff and its environs in new ways and to discover facets of the city they would not normally expect to find.
At a deeper level, the festival interrogates our position in Europe and its wider global ramifications. Diffusion 2013 highlights the role of photography, as arguably the world’s most democratic and visible medium, to record contemporary life as lived, to represent urban and rural experience, and to imagine a future orientated new European Identity.
Above all, Diffusion 2013 is a celebration of photography and the photographic image, in all its forms. Whether created, published, exhibited, collected or distributed in a physical or virtual way, the photograph has the power to inspire and provoke reaction, to reflect our own experience and that of society evolving around us.
Further Information
Elin Hâf, NLW Press Office 01970 632534 post@llgc.org.uk