All About
the Light

Dave Coffey travelled into Bosnia in the closing stages of the war and the years that followed, much of this work made in and around Mostar, where the centuries-old bridge lay broken in the Neretva and a swaying length of cable and plank carried people across in its place. He went not for the spectacle of ruin but for what the light still found there: a face at a fence, washing strung across a shrapnel-pocked wall, a family seated among the few things they had managed to save.

What holds the series together is not the damage but the endurance. Aid workers sort boxes of medicine; an old woman knits in a doorway and laughs; children pile in for the camera and grin. Shot only in available light and only in black and white, these are photographs of a place picking itself back up, and of the ordinary dignity Coffey found in everyone who stood before his lens.

These photographs come from the hill country of Machakos in eastern Kenya, where Coffey travelled to make a record of a community and its days. He worked in the high, clear light of the equator, the kind that falls hard and leaves deep shadow, and used it to model faces, hands and the red dust of the road.

There is work here and there is play: schoolchildren crowding the frame, a choir girl caught mid-song, siblings shoulder to shoulder, donkeys on the long climb out of the valley. As everywhere in his pictures, the subject is not hardship or distance but presence, the ordinary dignity of people meeting the camera on their own ground.

Coffey settled in Swansea in 1984, and the long peninsula on its doorstep became his nearest and most returned-to subject. The Gower is a place of tides and weather, of headlands that come and go in the haze, and he came to know its silver light over many years and in every season.

These are patient pictures, made early or late when the sun is low and the wet sand holds the sky. Footsteps cross an empty beach; a rugged coast falls into the water; walkers are reduced to small dark notes against the bright expanse. The city sits at the edge of the series, the working bay that frames the wilder ground beyond it.

Coffey was born in Liverpool in 1944, and the city keeps a particular hold on his work. He returns to it as both photographer and native, drawn to its working light, the grain of its streets and the rooms that hold a century of ordinary life.

The pictures here move between the public and the private: a figure on the move through the city, a lounge in Romer Road, a wall of sixties paper that has outlived the people who chose it. Together they read less as a portrait of a place than as a meditation on memory, on what a city keeps and what it quietly lets go.

Away from any single place, Coffey carries the same eye onto the pavement. Street photography is the discipline of the unguarded instant, of being ready for the fraction of a second in which a stranger, a gesture or an accident of light arranges itself into a picture.

He works quietly and close, looking for the small human comedy and the quieter moments folded inside it: a child lost in wonderment, a figure framed by a doorway, two strangers caught in passing. Nothing is staged. The light does the choosing, and the photographer’s only task is to see it in time.

If the other series look outward, this one turns toward home. Memories gathers the closest subject of all, the people, places and quiet still lifes that a life is measured in, and asks what a photograph chooses to keep for us once the moment itself has gone.

Here are thresholds and stairways, egrets at the water, telegraph poles marching to the horizon, a silent passage of light through an interior. Some are tender and some are strange, but all of them are about time, and the way an image can hold a fragment of the world still long enough for it to become memory.