Spectacle
John Briggs
Newport Town was once described unflatteringly in the 1980’s as ‘a no man’s land, a no plans land’. Projects such as the Friars Walk shopping centre were unimaginable then. Be that as it may, I adopted it as my hometown in 1976, as a newly qualified high school teacher and, just as importantly, as a photographer keen to hit the streets with my SLR to explore its urban fabric and its humanity. What I soon discovered was that Newport as a town had a certain appeal, photographically speaking, that I hadn’t encountered in my American hometown, or in Cardiff, where I’d just spent two years. For anyone drawn to photographing human nature, every city has endless possibilities. But what Newport does so well is to bring large numbers of people together in a relatively small space, either in the city centre or within its different and diverse communities, From where I live, camera in hand, I walk to the town centre in less than 10 minutes, or to Baneswell or Maindee, Pill or Ridgeway. I can be with the people of Bettws or Ringland in 15 minutes on the bus. I never had to go very far afield for the subjects of my book ‘Newportrait’ (Seren 2009). But if the human spectacle on the city streets, even though diverse, was more predictable a decade ago, momentous events in more recent times have brought about very different human encounters in the city. The Ryder Cup (2010), NATO Conference and associated protests (2014) Black Lives Matter protest (2020) have seen to that. Not just Newport’s citizens but others from all over the world have taken part in human gatherings never seen before in ‘the Port’. The contrasting use of analogue black and white versus digital colour imagery serves to dramatize the progression in time from older scenarios to newer ones. Following Newport’s human spectacle over the last 40 years has been a fascinating preoccupation. My archive will continue to expand as we now face the challenges of our pandemic – tainted future and the effects it will have on us all.
About Artist
John Briggs
John Briggs is a photographer from Minnesota who has lived permanently in south Wales since the 1970s. As a student at Atlantic College in the mid-1960s he ventured on to the streets of Cardiff with his first SLR. In Minnesota for university in the late 60s and early 70s he worked part-time as a photographer for the Minnesota Daily. He returned to Wales in 1974 for teacher training at Cardiff University, taught French in comprehensive schools for 24 years, but also photographed extensively in Cardiff’s city centre, docklands and steelworks communities as well as his adopted hometown of Newport. He is the author of 4 books published by Seren, documenting the changes that have taken place in Cardiff and Newport over the past 4 decades. In addition to published works, his images have been exhibited widely in Cardiff and Newport.
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