ROGER BRINGS COMMUNITY INTO FOCUS
APHOTOGRAPHER has spent years documenting the LGBT community across South Wales – decades after missing the opportunity to picture the people who inspired the hit film Pride. Roger Tiley photographed the miners’ strike during the 1980s but was discouraged from photographing the Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners group. Almost 30 years later he was invited to a reunion of the group – sparking a project that h has documented everything from the Cardiff Pride parade to transgender steel workers. Roger, 58, from Crosskeys, said: “Back during the miners’ strike in around 1984 and 1985 I was working for some national newspapers covering the strike. “During that strike there were some LGBT people who were w collecting g money y for the miners, which is what the story of the film Pride is based on.
“Things were very different back then, especially in working-class areas like the Valleys.
“And I’m not sure if it was tongue in cheek but the union said they’d rather I didn’t photograph the people helping them so I missed out. “I always felt disappointed I did.” But in 2015 Roger was invited back to a reunion of the Lesbian & Gays Support the Miners at the Onllwyn Miners’ welfare hall in the Dulais Valley.
The reunion sparked the start of the project which is now set to be exhibited ed in Abertillery.
Roger, a photographer of 40 years, said: “It’s an absolutely massive subject which I didn’t really realise.
“I have just been listening to ordinary people. I have been quite surprised, actually – I probably had this stereotype that none would be working class but I was wrong.
“I have learnt a lot myself through the project.”
Roger, who is known for photographing industrial communities, especially miners and their families in the UK and the USA, said this project also evolved from that previous work.
He added that the exhibition was the first part of the project. He plans to continue photographing the community.
The exhibition, entitled The Gender Journey Part One, runs from March 3 to March 31 at the Kickplate Gallery in Church Street, St , Abertillery. y