John Briggs

Born in Chester, we moved around with my father's work until eventually my own job brought me to Wales, where I have lived now for many years.  We have strong family connection in North Wales and my Grandfather was Bill Crawford, whose 'W.H. Crawford' film collection is now deposited with the National Screen and Sound Archive in Aberystwyth.  

My own career took me into Landscape Architecture, and the landscapes of Wales as well as other parts of northern England and Scotland have greatly inspired me.  I developed a love of photography as a way to capture the beauty and diversity of the character of our landscapes.  This continues but more recently that has evolved into the very different, people- and movement-focused medium of video.  In that, I have perhaps started to followed my Grandfather's interest in people and events through moving pictures, although the context is so very different today with the ease and mass popularity of digital recording and editing media.  

Today I live on the Isle of Anglesey in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and feel so lucky to do so.  I enjoy the sense of community that living in a rural area bounded by the coast on 2 sides brings, and it was partly the desire to bring in a greater human interest element to my work that I took to video.  However I still enjoy still-image landscape photography and I have accumulated a collection now that covers all parts of Wales but most particularly the north, as well as many parts of Northern England and Scotland where I also lived too.  

I find industrial history and railways particularly fascinating and I have often taken documentary photographs to record what's left of something that I think is likely to change or disappear.  So much of our heritage is of the moment we find it and only a small amount is formally protected or preserved.  I may not be able to protect everything (nor perhaps would I need to) but I can try to record what I find through my photography and video, as a snapshot in time of some longer post-industrialisation process.   I don’t ever imagine that my photographs would win awards, but I do ask the question: what’s going to be of more interest to society in 50 years time, that arty sunset image that looks nice on my wall, or that documentary record of that place that is no longer here?

With that in mind it appears very appropriate that I have now discovered the People's Collection Wales so that at least some of my 'findings' can be saved here for posterity.