WALES 1953Frank was drawn to Wales, in part, by his reading of Richard Llewelyn's novel How Green Was My Valley (1939). Llewelyn traces the decline of a close-knit mining community, blighted by pollution, company exploitation and social division.
BEN JAMES - COAL MINER, Caerau, Wales 1953
Collection of the artist, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
In March 1953, Frank travelled to Caerau, a mining village in Glamorgan, South Wales. He decided to create a series of photographs based around the daily life of the 53-year-old Ben James, who had worked down the pits since he was 14. Frank followed James into the mines, but also photographed his home life and the broader mining community. The Caerau colliery was already in decline, and employed a fraction of the workforce it had supported 30 years earlier. Like Richard Llewelyn, Frank was witnessing the end of a way of life. As if to underline this realisation, the series includes a formal portrait of Ben James with his wife and his son David, who was studying geology in Swansea, and would become the first member of his family not to go down the mines.
When Frank's photographs were published in U.S. Camera magazine in 1955, he wrote: 'I could have followed a livelier and perhaps
more colourful Welsh miner but I'm happy I decided to portray Ben James. When I said farewell to him I realised that no future
story on any Welsh miner will look as this one does.'