{"id":883,"date":"2010-01-10T18:38:48","date_gmt":"2010-01-10T18:38:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=883"},"modified":"2010-01-10T18:38:48","modified_gmt":"2010-01-10T18:38:48","slug":"aberystwyth-chloe-dewe-mathews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=883","title":{"rendered":"Aberystwyth – Chloe Dewe Mathews"},"content":{"rendered":"

Somehow Aberystwyth seems to me to be the last place a photographer would go for an interesting story, but London-based freelance Chloe Dewe Mathew<\/a>s has proved me wrong with her Hasidic Holiday: The Annual trip to Aberystwyth<\/a> which appeared on Burn Magazine today.\u00a0 Apparently around a thousand orthodox Jews have taken an annual holiday together there each August, staying in the student village for the last 20 years or more.<\/p>\n

Obviously Mathews has succeeded in gaining the confidence of the families she has photographed and given us an insider view of a community which likes to keep itself. On her web site<\/a> you you can also see another rather different story about an annual visit to the sea, when tens of thousands of European Roma make a pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer<\/a> in late May for the festival of their patron saint, Black Sara. Her pictures from this are rather more emotional than those from <\/span>Aberystwyth, but perhaps that is not surprising given the nature of the event.\u00a0 But the Welsh work has a clarity of colour and a precision that appeals to me.<\/p>\n

There are a few pictures of the Jewish holidays by a Welsh photographer (who has also produced a book on Aberystwyth), Keith Morris, on the Welsh Photolibrary<\/a> site (perhaps surprisingly, apparently the only 8 images on the site featuring Jewish people.)\u00a0 Like the Guardian link in the above paragraph I think these are interesting simply as an illustration of the difference between competent library images and some excellent photojournalistic projects.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0 think it must be around 50 years since I last visited Aberystwyth, as a small boy with my family on a coach outing from an isolated village in mid-Wales where some of us were staying one summer.\u00a0 It wasn’t quite like the outing in one of Dylan Thomas’s short stories, but there were some similarities.\u00a0 We did eventually get there, after quite a few stops on the way, and about all I can remember about the place was that it seemed cold, windy, wet and grey. But it doesn’t quite look that way in Mathews’s pictures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Somehow Aberystwyth seems to me to be the last place a photographer would go for an interesting story, but London-based freelance Chloe Dewe Mathews has proved me wrong with her Hasidic Holiday: The Annual trip to Aberystwyth which appeared on Burn Magazine today.\u00a0 Apparently around a thousand orthodox Jews have taken an annual holiday together … Continue reading Aberystwyth – Chloe Dewe Mathews<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photographers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}