It's grey and depressing, but it's ok - it's Swansea

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 5 photos

My name is Simon Schmitt and I just completed my Master’s Degree in political communication within the Erasmus Mundus programme “Journalism, Media and Globalization”. This joint project of five European universities took me to a couple of wonderful and amazing cities like Amsterdam, Sydney or Hamburg – cities in which it was rather easy to take colourful and vivid photos.

However, my studies forced me also to go to the small city of Swansea, a grey and depressing place in the middle of Wales. It seems the city, after experiencing its heyday at the beginning of the 20th century, has stopped developing: Old bridges that start somewhere in the scenery and end nowhere. Walls that are merely kept upright by wooden beams, which appear to need the same support. Inhabitants who flee the city for the lovely, scenic landside and leave their houses behind. If one sees the low tide in the morning and the distance the sea withdraws to, one cannot help but think that not even the water wants to get too close to the city. Swansea becomes slowly obsolete.

In my photos I tried to capture this state of being out of date, this standstill in time. I think it is easy to take beautiful pictures of lovely places. It is the ugly, the grey, the depressing which most people close their eyes towards, that makes photography a challenge. But even if we try to forget about it, it remains still out there and it deserves to be portrayed in a respectful way. I am not sure if my images of Swansea can give this impression. I am not sure if I was able to catch the ugly beauty of this place in which the thought of being stuck entwines around one. However, my photos show Swansea the way it feels.