Rhondda Portraits: Images by Isabel Alexander, Commentary by Donald Alexander

Edited and introduced by Robin Alexander
2024

ISBN 978-1-9996474-7-6

66 pages
With 43 illustrations
170 x 245 mm

Rhondda Portraits recalls South Wales mining communities as artist Isabel Alexander encountered them in 1943-4. Her portraits of miners, their wives and their children reflect strength, resilience and dignity as well as poverty and hardship. Her pitscapes capture the drama of Rhondda’s industrial structures and detritus, looming tips, densely-packed housing and mountainous setting. Donald Alexander’s lively and sometimes provocative commentary sets the images in historical and political context, adds vital technical detail, and provides salient notes on those portrayed. Resurrected from a forgotten wartime typescript, Rhondda Portraits is edited and introduced by Robin Alexander.

Isabel Alexander (1910-1996) was a Slade-trained artist whose media encompassed drawing, water colour, oils, lithography, lino-printing and 3-D, and whose works ranged from documentation of Welsh coalminers, Irish fishermen and English farmworkers through book illustration to portraits, landscapes, seascapes and abstracts. Since her death her work has attracted renewed interest: 2017 was marked by a major retrospective exhibition and Janet McKenzie’s book Isabel Alexander: artist and illustrator; while in 2021 Parthian Press revisited her 1944-5 collaboration with Rhondda’s miner-writer B.L.Coombes and, with Peter Wakelin, produced a striking new edition of Miner’s Day.

Donald Alexander (1913-93) directed, produced, scripted or shot over 100 films between the 1930s and 1970s documenting social conditions and industrial processes in Britain’s coal-mining, steel and cotton communities. He worked first with Paul Rotha at Strand films, then co-founded and led DATA, a documentary film-makers’ co-operative, before spearheading the National Coal Board’s film unit, which generated a stream of technical films and the long-running cine-magazine Mining Review. The British Film Institute rates the NCB Film Unit ‘one of the world’s biggest and best industrial film units’ and Donald Alexander as ‘arguably the key figure in the story of coal on film’.

Robin Alexander is Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, and formerly Professor of Education at the universities of Leeds, Warwick and York.