The National Museum of Wales, situated in Cardiff, regularly plays host to numerous exhibitions. It has a remit to promote Wales’ heritage and achievements through the arts on an international stage, as well as hosting travelling exhibitions as a recognised venue. It had gained a prominent reputation for hosting exhibitions that major in photography, partly due to the museum’s efforts in developing archives of prominent Welsh practitioners.
The current exhibition showcasing the history of the influential news and current affairs magazine Picture Post is part of that remit, as well as linking directly to Cardiff. Picture Post was the British equivalent of similar news and journalistic magazines across Europe and North America and ran from 1938 to 1957, a time when most news was delivered via print. Crucially, it spanned the period of the Second World War and the annexation of Europe into the Cold War of the 1950s.
Magazines of this nature mixed “softer” stories within the more hard-hitting and significant world events to offer their readers a complete experience of the times they lived in. Crucial to the success of such magazines was the quality of their photography, and many key photographers used such magazines to develop stories and positions within their work. The notion of the photo-journalist begins during this period.
Picture Post was celebrated as being one of the first news magazines that gave more prominence to the photographs than the accompanying text, and, as such, was a key development in British photographic history. PP photographers like Bert Hardy are synonymous with this period and his Box Brownie images became iconic PP covers, exemplifying a “carefree post-war Britain”. PP’s covers had a striking design and logo but always gave prominence to the front cover image, for an impactful presence on the news kiosk.
One of the most striking exhibits here is the collage of its covers as a historical overview of the range and reach of the publication. The Cardiff exhibition reflects this as it captures each issue in terms of its design and layout, as well as background and historical information and memorabilia from PP’s history, with different sections being themed to different aspects of life and expectations of the time. It was good to see the exhibition majoring on Welsh stories and how the country was seen through the eyes of this magazine; the Cardiff section shows how Tiger Bay and Butetown were depicted post war as a growing multicultural area.
Also, it showcased the amount of coverage given to the drowning of the Tryweryn Valley, Capel Celyn, and the efforts to protect the area from its eventual fate: the 1965 flooding to create the controversial Llyn Celyn reservoir—an event that has over time become central to Welsh nationalist identity. The exhibition also shows PP’s efforts to cover international events, such as a powerful section on South African Apartheid and extensive detail on conflicts from before, during, and following the Second World War. Sections that showcase the London Blitz, the Suez War, and the Korean War produced iconic images from the history of photo-journalism, and were featured alongside cameras, proofs, and layouts.
The exhibition discusses the editorial processes in selecting and developing the stories and the picture-editing processes that created such iconic spreads. This behind-the-scenes aspect of the show underlines how much effort and industry was used in creating what was the most popular weekly publication in Britain during the period of its publication. The exhibition also points out just how influential this publication became— its editors, writers, and photographers moved to publications such as the Sunday Times Magazine (amongst others), which housed many of the images and articles from PP to this day.
It was great to see a visiting exhibition of this nature being held in Cardiff. Its curation was to be inclusive and this was prominent in the way it showcased Wales and the wider world in its pages.