Robert Hughes, a photographer based in rural Monmouthshire, tells us a little about his life in Photography, and his reportage project at Abergavenny’s livestock market.
My interest in photography started in my early twenties with the encouragement of my father who was always developing film and disappearing into the darkroom to produce prints. At this time any photographic opportunity was fair game. However, browsing in a bookshop in Cardiff I came across a book by James Ravilious entitled “The heart of the Country” which changed my perception on picture taking.
I have always been interested in rural scenes and crafts and decided this was the photographic route I wanted to take. I started to take reportage documentary style images. Inspiration came from my favourite photographers of the genre, Cartier Bresson, James Ravilious and Sebastiao Salgado. At this time I also experimented with landscape photography and was an active member of Leica Postal Portfolios.
Abergavenny Livestock Market
Photography finally became a passion when I moved from an SLR camera to the world renowned rangefinder M camera, which was very light and ideal for the style of photography I was pursuing. I started attending local ploughing and hedging matches, producing the end result in monochrome, which is my favourite medium for this type of photography.
By now, bitten by the bug, I attended a photo course at The Hill and part of the course was to produce a portfolio of pictures on a chosen theme. My theme was fly fishing on the river Usk, which for the first time was done digitally. This is where I heard about the Abergavenny Livestock Market re-location but it was a few years later before I visited the market to take photographs. I was very much taken with the atmosphere and the characters that make up the palette of the market. During the last eighteen months I have been visiting the market at key times to record events as and when time allows. My intention is to follow the market through 2013 until its final move to Bryngwyn in the autumn. Hopefully, I will self publish a book of the images I have recorded over the last few years.
See more of Robert’s photography including the Market photos, Robert’s commissioned work and a portfolio of images taken at Cheltenham & Ascot at:
www.celticeyephotography.co.uk
and on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/photos/celticeye
