“I don’t take photographs without light… it’s all about the light.” Dave Coffey BA(Hons) ARPS
Light is the subject. Across decades and continents, drawn from one photographer’s world, these pictures hold still the moment a place gives itself away.
This exhibition gathers the documentary work of Dave Coffey BA(Hons) ARPS. Frames carried home from the war-scarred streets of Bosnia, the red earth of Machakos in Kenya, the long tides of Swansea and the Gower, and the working light of Liverpool. Running beneath them all is a quieter, more personal current: family, and the way memory keeps its own archive.
Coffey works only in black and white, and only ever in available light. Stripped of colour, a photograph is left with its essentials: gesture, shadow, the grain of a face, the geometry of a street. What remains is testimony. People met, weather endured, ordinary days that turned out to matter.
Hung together, the series speak to one another. A child in Machakos answers a child in Liverpool; a Gower headland rhymes with a Bosnian hillside. The thread is not place but attention, and the light that made each one possible.
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.
Before any exhibition is seen, it has to be built. These photographs catch the work going up: the Llanelli Photographic Society’s display boards braced and dressed, white cotton gloves on the prints, the careful business of levelling, spacing and hanging.
It is the part of a show almost nobody sees, the hours of measuring and second-guessing that turn a stack of framed pictures into a room you can walk through.
And then the doors open. These are photographs of the exhibition itself: the finished walls, and the family, friends and fellow photographers who came to stand in front of the work.
After a lifetime of pointing the camera at other people, it is Coffey’s turn to be among the watched, sharing the room with the pictures and the company they drew together.
Dave Coffey was born in Liverpool in 1944. His passion for photography began at the age of twelve, when his mother bought him a Kodak Brownie 127 camera. He soon caught the bug, built a makeshift darkroom in his bedroom, and taught himself to develop negatives and print his own images.
As a teenager he was invited to assist a local wedding photographer, gaining hands-on experience in darkroom technique and at countless weddings. One day, owing to a double booking, the photographer asked the fifteen-year-old Coffey to shoot a wedding single-handed. It went well enough that he went on to photograph family weddings and many other occasions of his own.
He had hoped to turn professional, but the cost of doing so put the idea out of reach. Competitive ice dancing took photography’s place for a time, and after years of training he became Liverpool Senior Ice Dance Champion for three successive years. At grammar school a second lifelong passion took hold, rugby, though he left without formal qualifications, less for any lack of ability than for a young man’s discomfort in the examination hall.
In 1971 he married his wife, Denise. A career with a national pharmaceutical distributor followed and kept him for thirty-nine years, moving the family through six cities across the UK before they settled in Swansea in 1984, where he managed the company’s warehouse until retiring in 2006. He and Denise raised two children, Angela and Philip, of whom he is enormously proud.
Photography returned in 1994, when he joined Swansea Camera Club. In the years that followed he took an A-level in the subject, was elected an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society (ARPS), and graduated from Swansea Metropolitan University in 2010 with a BA (Hons) in Photojournalism. When Swansea Camera Club closed its doors in 2023 he joined the Llanelli Photographic Society.
This exhibition brings five journeys and a lifetime of looking together for the first time, one way of seeing held across more than four decades. Coffey is indebted to the Llanelli Photographic Society for the loan of its display boards, and to St Hilary’s Church for the use of its hall.
Dedicated to his wife, Denise, and to his children, Angela and Philip.