A FFOTOGALLERY exhibition in Penarth will celebrate life in the South Wales Valleys.

Photos from Walter Waygood and Huw Alden Davies will be on displayed from July 16 to September 3 with the preview and artist take on Friday, July 15 at 6pm.

Youth is a time of hope and ambition, change and uncertainty, of prospects both good and bad.

Where Will I Be is an exhibition featuring two Welsh photographers, Walter Waygood and Huw Alden Davies, whose work is rooted in the place they come from, the South Wales

Valleys, and revolves around their immediate family, friends and a colourful cast of local characters.

For Walter Waygood, who photographed in Blaenafon and Merthyr in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sees 'beauty in the ordinary' and nobility in the lives of the people he grew up

with, however mixed their fortunes turned out to be. Recently returning to his spiritual home of Merthyr after 20 years 'in exile' in England, there is a contemporary resonance in

Waygood's images from a time when political viewpoints were grounded in family discussions around the dinner table "where you debate and iron out differences in an attempt to put the world to right".

Arranged as a collection of photographs and short texts, Huw Alden Davies’ Prince is a detailed and often humorous study of the artist’s father, a by-product of a generation and its

slanted views of the world. The story unfolds in the village of Tumble, where Davies and his family still live.

As the artist explains: “This project is not only an attempt to reconnect with this childhood notion, but to try and record and capture the essence of a man and his eccentricities. To document a side unknown to others and to explore the physiological or even cultural elements that inform the image that should have been my role model.”

Where Will I Be is part of a series of exhibitions and projects Ffotogallery is undertaking which explore social, cultural and environmental issues in the context of contemporary

Wales.

David Drake, Ffotogallery’s director, comments: “We want to highlight the role of photography, as arguably the world’s most democratic and visible medium, to record current experiences as lived, and to represent the processes of social, economic and cultural transformation that inform Wales’ identity and its standing in the world”

The exhibition will be held at Ffotogallery, Turner House, Plymouth Road, Penarth. The exhibition will be open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 5pm.