David Wilson’s latest photography collection offers readers the chance to explore rural Wales like never before.
Peeling Paint and Rust is a testament in pictures to changes in society and habits of living as older ways of Welsh life are left behind but which nevertheless maintain their own melancholic beauty. Although known for his black-and-white photography photography that uniquely evokes the character and atmosphere of the nation’s landscapes, David Wilson’s new collection of colour shots captures the changing textures of man-made features: a once-thriving village shop, a decaying Morris 1000, the corrugated iron for which Wales has a particular affection. The book includes a foreword by Salvage Hunters’ Drew Pritchard celebrating the intricacy and the lasting character of Wilson’s images, saying, ‘The series of photographs which make up the following pages may convince every reader of the necessity of preserving that which others may overlook.’ David Wilson said:
“I’ve been privileged to venture around Wales taking photographs for various black and white landscape book projects. But on my travels, I kept encountering the incredible colours and textures of peeling paint and rust. I’d be on my way to a location and suddenly I’d see a bright, flaking village shopfront – or a corrugated garage or tractor graveyard and be stopped in my tracks. The colours were amazing and I had to capture them – in colour! “Over nearly twenty years I accumulated a collection of images of this wonderful decay and one day I realised that they hung together as a whole. Together, they tell a story of rural Wales. The patina of weather-aged surfaces and rusting metal feel like works of art to me. I love looking at them and I hope others do too.”