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The brooding landscape
of Ystradgynlais in the Upper Tawe Valley of South Wales forms the subject-matter
of this powerful work. Josef Herman moved to this mining community after
World War II and lived and worked as an artist there for eleven years.
Herman had come to Great Britain as a Polish-Jewish refugee from National
Socialism before the Second World War, having first fled to Brussels
in 1938. On the invasion of Belgium by Germany, he went to France and
from there to the United Kingdom, settling first in Glasgow and then
in London.
Herman was thus very much an outsider looking in to the life of this
remote community of miners, capturing the hard life that the miners
and their families endured, but also acting as an intimate witness to
their social lives and rituals in the pubs to which the miners flocked
after their shifts ended to quench their coal-dust thirst. This view
of Ystradgynlais, captured in muted tones, shows a solitary figure against
the shapes of buildings in the town. This figure can be read as Herman’s
own alter ego, a man apart from the crowd who walks the streets of this
mining community, but does not belong there. He bears witness to a life
that is not his.
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