Interpreting a Photograph

Because a picture speaks a thousand words and I don't post nearly enough of them

This photograph, as the bilingual Welsh-English caption beneath the print helpfully tell us, is by a Welsh photographer called David Hurn (born 1934). The title or description reads: "Coach party from the valleys on holiday during the fortnight close down of the pits. Aberavon, Wales." The picture was taken in 1971 but donated to the Welsh museum (Amgueddfa Cymru) in 2017. So much for the descriptive mise-en-scène, the catalogue entry so to speak. A lot has changed since the picture was snapped 53 years ago, obviously, so perhaps a little context is in order, especially for my non-UK based readers.

The south of Wales was the heartland of heavy industry in Britain, the area with massive coal extraction and export shipping, as well as metalworking. So much so that the city of Swansea in south Wales was once known as 'Copperopolis', due to its status as the world's foremost site for smelting and working copper (and tin); by the late 19th century ships carried copper ore from Santiago de Chile halfway round the globe to Swansea for manufacturing into goods that then found their way dispersed around the world again to the far-flung corners of the British Empire. Already by the turn of the 19th century, the industrial decline had set in, slowly at first, but gaining pace after the Second World War. However, the largest steelworks in western Europe were created in this period, at Port Talbot just round the bay from Swansea, and within spitting distance of the beach at Aberavon featured in this photograph. In fact, the blast furnaces of Port Talbot are situated off-camera, right behind the viewer, and the city of Swansea is equally just off-view along the bay to the far left at top.

In 1971 the coal mines were still open, and the steelworks were blasting their furnaces at full steam. The death knell for the mines came in 1984 with the Miners' Strike, and the steelworks are threatened right now with the loss of half of the current workforce, some 2,000 jobs - but that is another story. Back in the early 70s, miners and their families enjoyed improved working conditions, fought for over may years, and comparatively good pay, as well as this fortnightly maintenance closure of the pits at the end of July to beginning of August, which allowed miners and their families (school holidays at the same time) to go off on vacation. Nothing as extravagant as a holiday abroad, though, hence the coach parties to organised seaside resorts like the above Aberavon beach.

So we have here, on the one hand, a documentary photograph showing a snapshot in time of a lost world of labour, industry and a vanished working-class society. Miners in Wales no longer exist due to the closure of the pits, and most people rarely go on coach holidays together anymore, just a slowly diminishing pool of seniors and pensioners, presumably the very people who on this photo were young and had grown up with this style of holidaying.

On the other hand, if you look at the photo outside of this socio-historical context, another story emerges. You see a group of around 20 people, almost all women, sitting on their deckchairs in a kind of self-made corral formed by the striped windbreak. In a fanciful way you could see this as a very British version of the protective circle of the waggon train formed by settlers in the American 'Wild West'. Only here it is not Indians they are sheltering from, but the rather stormy weather (see the waves breaking on the shore in the background) of what passes for summer in Wales. One lone soul is seen wandering off away from this corralled group all by himself carrying a surfboard. I say most likely a man because back in 1971 surfing was still very much a gendered activity geared towards young men. We the viewers do not know if the lone surfer is part of the group, or just a random person on the beach. Be that as it may, this to me is the striking thing about this photograph: the juxtaposition between the lone surfer (with all the semantic load of freedom, unconformity and youth that surfing carried with it in the late 60s and early 70s) and the sheltered, almost claustrophobically confined group of women. The one and the many.

Now comes the icing on the proverbial cake. This relates to the exhibition of the photograph, the spatial positioning of the artefact. The picture I took of this image, that is a photograph of a photograph, was not in a museum or art gallery, but was snapped just around the corner from this building:

The painted lines on the ground and the crash barrier might give the observant viewer some hint as to what this building related to. Dear reader, patience please, all will be revealed in due course, suffice it to say the photo of the miners' holiday was printed on a weather-proof board which was pinned to the exterior wall, just round the corner to the right of this building, together with a handful of other pieces of what passes for 'public art' in Wales. Presumably any pedestrians walking along, like the guy in T-shirt and shorts on the far right, who had their eyes open and their cognitive functions intact would have seen this photo coming in or out from the building.

To get to this building you had to leave the main road connecting the city of Swansea (of aforementioned copper fame) with the motorway. You followed signs directing you down this road:

Perhaps you may think the comparison a little far-fetched, but this view reminds me of nothing so much as the desolate, despairing vista of the approach to something whose very existence most people wish to ignore, like say a particularly disagreeable factory or an abattoir, or even a prison. Scenic highlights en route to the destination, and where the photograph was displayed, included a number of structures like this:

A few turns along this post-industrial wasteland, and you were nearly there. This is what greeted you just before you arrived:

Yes, it was the middle of summer in 2021, so precisely 50 years after the miners' holiday photograph had been taken in July or August 1971, and the vaccination frenzy was at its height. The bilingual sign makes this clear. The building behind the fence, decorated in blue and yellow, is the back of the same building that carried the photograph. Why this particular shade of blue and yellow? Did someone know that six months later these would be the trendy colours to display in one's support for Ukraine? Probably just a random correlation. But in case the 'vaccination' sign was not enough, the quasi-religious mural thanking 'our' NHS (the British national health service, coincidentally created by a Welshman in Tredegar, one of those mining towns in the valleys) with its dedicatedly stern and seriously masked nurse staring at the passer by in an undoubtedly completely unironic and unintended imitation of that Big Brother face seen in the movie version of Orwell's 1984, should have been warning enough. Alas, few heeded it. Large numbers of the good citizens of Swansea and surrounding areas in this part of south Wales dutifully made the pilgrimage to receive 'their shots', and walked the final part of the journey past the photograph of the holidaying miners on the beach.

And here we come to my final and third way of looking at this picture. The following interpretation I derive from the combination between what the photo depicts at the surface, namely a group of enclosed people on one side juxtaposed with one lone figure on the other side, and the context of its public display, namely on the wall of the exterior waiting area of a Covid mass-vaccination centre. In a metaphorical sense, then, the group of (predominantly) women who are surrounded by the confinements of their sheltering barrier, looking inwards towards each other within the circle but every single one failing to notice let alone pay attention to the lone figure of the surfer walking away from their enclosure, may symbolise the mass of people who, for whatever reasons they may personally have had, went along with the dominant narrative, craved the 'safety' promised by the 'vaccines' and shut themselves off from the world around (like a voluntary continuation of lockdown). The lone surfer, with his individuality and risk-taking sport, becomes the proverbial 'black sheep' (he is literally wearing a dark surf suit) evading the herd. All the more bitter the irony of displaying such an image outside the entrance to a place that people had been cajoled, coerced and herded into. I wonder how many noticed this photograph at all, let alone pondered its meaning. And I wonder even more if there were any who discovered their 'inner surfer' and walked away.

(Thank you for reading this far. What follows is a coda for the historically-minded nerd. Skip if such things bore you.)

The practice of looking for multiple interpretations of the same phenomenon, ideally in an ordered if not hierarchical fashion, is nothing new. It is certainly not a claim to intellectual superiority the post-modern academic can make. No, the different levels of interpretation were an 'invention' of those dark, dismal, 'stupid' Middle Ages. Medieval theologians called it teleology. Teleology is the interpretation of something according to multiple, and hierarchical, levels of meaning and understanding. Each level builds on the former, and leads (from Greek 'telos') on to the next. In high medieval theology in particular, the Bible was interpreted in such hermeneutic fashion. An event or episode of the Bible could have a hierarchy of interpretations, namely

• literal

• allegorical/typological

• moral/tropological

• and anagogical.

So the literal interpretation relates the simple story, the facts of the event so to speak, for example the story of Jonah and the whale from the Bible. The allegorical or typological interpretation moves up a notch, in the sense of biblical interpretation by comparing events from the Old Testament with those of the New Testament; here the story of Jonah from the Old Testament becomes an allegory for Christ's resurrection in the New. The third level extends the interpretative function even further into a kind of moralising verdict on the story; in my example this would be taking the story of Jonah as an injunction to faith in deliverance from evil. The fourth level of interpretation in the medieval sense looked to the future, so how the plain story might point to future events in Christian belief, such as heaven and hell, or the Last Judgment. The word 'eschatology' is another technical term for this. Jonah's deliverance from the whale then becomes a prefiguration of the Resurrection.

My little photo essay obviously only goes up to the third level, and when I started writing this I never set out deliberately to follow the medieval system of teleology. Now, however, that I have done so, perhaps the parallels become clear. The photo of the holiday party at Aberavon beach is simply described, as factually as possible, in the first level of interpretation: who took it, when, where located, what the title is. In my second interpretation I moved into the realm of allegory, viewing the photo as an example of the protection-seeking group versus the risk-taking individual. And in the third interpretation I drew links to our experiences of the past three years and how our actions and reactions were shaped by these. Although I did not come up with an example for the fourth level, I wonder now if that might not be possible by focussing on the Lone Surfer and taking to heart the message so often voiced by the Critical Thinkers and assorted dissidents: "Just Say No" and "Do Not Comply".