How Green Was My Valley is a photographic project based on the 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, and then in 1941 the novel was adapted to cinema by director John Ford. The novel and film are based on the coal mining industry in the Rhondda Valley, Wales, that was booming in this era. The story is told through the lens of Huw Morgan whom is the youngest of the Morgan Family, the family the film is based on. The common themes that run throughout this story are family, despair, and love.

 

Although this project is about how people in the Rhondda Valley have reclaimed the land in which the mines used to exist in, during an era of deindustrialisation. This project is about reclamation of land by local people that was once owned by industrial figureheads. The prominent purpose of the project is to emphasise the importance of green spaces that are owned by local people, and to be celebratory of the people in the South Wales valleys rather than reinforcing a ‘woe is me’ rhetoric that often comes from overwhelmingly working class spaces. This project is made up of diptychs of portraits and spaces both from the Rhondda, to create a narrative to emphasise how the regions spaces now belong solely to those that occupy It.