Desmond’s Mine
Desmond’s Mine was a small, independently owned drift mine by Pantygasseg, near Pontypool in the South Wales Valleys. It was one of only a handful of mines in Britain which still used pit ponies, and it did so right up until 1999, making Desmond’s the last mine in Britain to do so. I photographed in the mine over a period of months in 1982, whilst still a student on the Documentary Photography course at Newport. The camaraderie and banter amongst the men was reminiscent of my time working on building sites and I felt instantly at ease in their company. With hindsight, one can see clearly why I would have been attracted to Desmond’s as a subject. At this time, so much of documentary photography in Britain was concerned with the preservation of ways of life which were under threat of change, or photographers were drawn to the quaint and whimsical. This was a tendency I would deliberately resist in later projects.
