Diffusion, Cardiff's premier photography festival is back for its second edition, and this year is looking to America for inspiration

Diffusion, the international photography biennale organised by Cardiff’s Ffotogallery is currently in full swing, hosting group shows, talks and photography-related events around the city for the entire month of October.

The theme, Looking for America, was announced back in May 2013, on the last day of the previous edition. Despite the continuous barrage of American imagery, David Drake (director of Ffotogallery and curator of the festival) says that the theme is as pertinent as ever.

“I was interested in the strange paradox that from outside of America there was still an allure around Americana and a lot of the things that become representative of the American Dream. But within America there was a sense of corrosion, that everything had gone wrong.

The inside perspective on America was quite dark and dystopian whereas from a European perspective America was still the promised land, a land of opportunity. I thought that we could have quite a lot of fun exploring those notions through the festival.”

The festival spans several sites around the city, in an effort to engage both serious photography lovers and a broader audience. The empty storefronts on Wood Street, a central area earmarked for regeneration have been repurposed into accessible gallery spaces.

The Abacus art space has been taken over by The Caravan Gallery, the mobile exhibition venue and visual arts project run by artists Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale. Constantly grappling with what they call “local distinctiveness and regional identity” with a mischievous sense of the surreal, they’ve set up an “art exhibition-cum-alternative visitor information centre” to explore the many facets of Cardiff.

Also on Wood Street is As It was Give(n) to Me, Stacy Kranitz’s installation exploring the former mining communities of Appalachia. The hard-edged images are leavened by historical maps, folk artefacts and found objects that allow for a more textured expression of post-industrial decline.

A couple of doors down is Roger Tiley’s own, softer black-and-white images of these communities. This bridge between Kranitz and Tiley, known for his work documenting Welsh coal mines, is a prime example of the vein of dialogue between Wales and America that Drake hopes runs through the exhibition.

“Looking at the experience of people in the former mining community of Appalachia and that of people in South Wales, you could find similar images – though perhaps the Welsh pictures have more people getting drunk and maybe different drugs… The impact of the closure of the mines on communities and the lack of prospects, the fact that in South Wales there is 35% unemployment… it parallels what’s going on in Appalachia.”

Similarly, Ken Griffith’s Patagonia delineates a shared culture between Wales and the Americas in a small pocket straddling Chile and Argentina. The New Zealander documented his expeditions to Chubut, Patagonia to follow in the footsteps of the Welsh settlers of the late 1800s who ventured to South America in search of a land where they could preserve their culture and language.

Stadium Plaza, a retail and leisure quarter replete with a Vue cinema and a bowling alley is another unexpected venue for Diffusion to sneak work into. While Vue punters queue at the concession stand, they’ll catch a glimpse of the raw, unvarnished images of California from Stephen McClaren’s Westcoastism. David Magnusson’s portraits of young girls from Louisiana, Colorado and Arizona who have taken purity vows with their fathers have been blown up to size, looming over the view of the River Taff. The curious can venture further to find work by the likes of Jack Latham, Janire Nájera, and Arthur Tress.

“A lot of the work seems to be about the construction of the American identity,” Drake comments, and the work sited in the Wales Millennium Centre is a particularly apt example of this. You’ll find two contrasting projects from Jona Frank; High School, a layered set of portraits exploring the tribal cliques and personalities that are tried on for size during these years, and Right, where she photographed students of a staunchly Republican Christian private school.

Clementine Schneidermann’s I Called her Lisa-Marie confirms that the Elvis legend is alive and well – from Memphis to Porthcawl, where an annual festival is held honouring the King. You’re never entirely sure whether the images are from Tennessee or South Wales, and as Drake says, “them becoming Elvis or surrounding themselves with memorablilia was a way people who’ve had quite tough lives, whether that be in South Wales or in Memphis, could transcend that through the glitter and kitsch of the Elvis phenomenon.”

Ffotogallery’s own space plays host to ‘And Now It’s Dark’, gathering the work of American heavyweights Jeff Brouws, Todd Hido and Will Steacy. Presenting an ambiguous vision of nocturnal American cities, the work highlights the revelatory effect of the presence of light in darkened spaces. Brouws and Steacy’s work points toward the underlying decay of the American city, made visible at night under brightly-lit neon signs. Hido’s photographs are more suburban and hint at the latent dangers and perhaps, pleasures of the night.

Besides the work being exhibited, the festival is running a number of photography-related events suitable for all audiences. Book launches and symposiums cater to the faithful, educational talks and workshops allow children to get involved and portfolio reviews offer the chance for young photographers to get their work seen by notable curators and professionals.

Wales is becoming something of a magnet for British and European photography students, with the acclaimed Documentary Photography course at University of Wales, Newport joined by flourishing institutions such as Trinity St David Swansea and Aberystwyth University. For Drake, Wales has always been a natural venue for photography.

“Photography has played a role in Wales since its invention in the 1830s when William Henry Fox Talbot made some of the world’s earliest photographs in and around Swansea and Margam. Eugene Smith, Philip Jones-Griffiths and Robert Frank’s images of the South Wales Valleys provide some of the most iconic representations of coal mining communities. That legacy perhaps explains the enduring interest Welsh audiences have in photographic images – both contemporary and historical.”

America, both as an idea and as a site for images, is perhaps overrepresented in the cultural sphere and at first glance is an odd fit for a Cardiff festival, but Drake disagrees:

“I did a project on Dylan Thomas’s time in New York last year and I realised there’s something about Welsh writers, artists, musicians etc. where they look West [to America]. It was true of Thomas, of John Cale when he went off and joined the Velvet Underground, and of W.H. Davies [the writer who spent time in 1890s America living as a hobo]. It’s not an accident that they end up in New York or Pennsylvania rather than Paris or London.”

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor notwithstanding, Wales and America are unlikely cultural bedfellows. While this bond between 3 million and 300 million is not the most prominent or prized relationship either nation has, with work from the likes of Julian Germain, Arthur Tress and Melissa Moore on show, Diffusion hopes to inspire audiences to look a bit closer.

Read the full article by Brennavan Sritharan here

The second edition of the Cardiff International Festival of Photography opens up for the month of October, taking over the city's galleries, bus stops and bowling alleys with imagery that grapples with the American landscape, culture and spirit. This year's Looking for America theme sees more than 30 renowned photographers looking at wilderness and community, cars and bars, suburbanites and outlaws. As well as celebrations of American life, there are inevitably questioning and dystopian images in the mix too. Jeff Brouws, Todd Hido, Will Steacy, Stacy Kranitz and David Magnusson are some of the big names chosen Festival Director David Drake, whose Welsh mother and Detroit father put him in an ideal place to assess the USA from Wales's cultural centre.

Why did you choose America as this year's theme?
I was quite interested in the idea of America because it's culturally such a strong reference point for so many things: movies, advertising, music, photography. You don't have to go to America to buy into that. There's something about the endless highway and the endless opportunity and the allure of Americana.

I see that you try and connect some of the work to Europe, more specifically Wales.

I thought it would be interesting to foreground what was actually happening in America and get the perspective from within, which is why Todd Hido, Will Steacy and Stacy Kranitz are involved. But I also want to present the view of America from Europe, so am showing Clémentine Schneidermann's work, which was photographed in South Wales and Memphis; both places there were people who weren't materially that well-off, or that happy, but were embracing the Elvis dream, helping them transcend their everyday existence.

If you're "Looking for America", what have you found?
Some of the work is very dystopian, and America is a very scary place in a lot of the pictures. Todd Hido has a David Lynch, Blue Velvet side to it. I also got introduced to Arthur Tress and the San Francisco '64 series of his seemed pertinent as well. That was called "the last year of innocence" in America. Martin Luther King had just won an award for his work for the civil rights movement, Kennedy had been assassinated, the Vietnam War was kicking off and The Beatles made their first trip to America. It captured one of those moments when American values, as they had been in the 1950s, were being challenged in the 60s. When I choose a historical show like that, it's because I want it to have a contemporary resonance.

You're showing the images in shopping malls, bus stations, bowling alleys and a customs house, as well as galleries. How come?

People like to encounter contemporary photography and art in unusual spaces. They like the dialogue between the work and the space it's shown in.

Which photographer really stands out for you this year?
Stacy Kranitz's project that we're showing, As It was Give(n) to Me, is really interesting. She's from Kentucky, so she's been making this work about a former mining community in trouble. There's a crystal meth problem, lap-dancing, people spiralling out control, but she also combines that with historical maps, documents, dolls and artefacts. It's beautifully installed. Those same problems of alcoholism and substance abuse are also quite prevalent in the old mining communities in Wales. There are some pretty punchy images in there.

How do you avoid covering the more obvious style of American photography and portrayal?

Sometimes it gets to the point when if you see another sub-Ansel Adams American landscape or desert road with tumbleweed, it makes me want to reach for my gun. A lot of people are trying to remake those classic photographs. They might well sell them in Santa Fe or wherever, but it's a pretty pointless thing to be doing. Whereas Matt Wilson working with expired film, coming up with these very poetic images that hint at a narrative, but don't spell it out in a literal way, is much more exciting. There is an issue with documentary photography - a lot of stuff looks quite similar, whether you're in Helsinki, Amsterdam, New York. There is a language of documentary photography. Some of the artists I've featured, might not be the greatest photographers in their genre, but they have something more interesting to say. It's whether the idea and the execution of the idea all comes together.

Read the full Article by Stuart Brumfitt here