Clementine Schneidermann
Summer Street Party, Merthyr Vale, 2018
A group of children gather around a trestle table for a party on a street in Merthyr Vale. They are surrounded by two facing rows of condemned houses, empty and awaiting demolition. This is a Potemkin village of memories, the carcass of a past that has already been decided upon. In this photograph two worlds collide: children who will shape the future, and the landscape scheduled for erasure.
The children are dwarfed by the buildings around them. The condemned terraces loom, their scale emphasising how small the figures are within the frame. But everything draws the eye towards the party. The high-fashion clothing in matching colours, the decorations splashed chaotically across painted facades, the energy that refuses containment. The children transcend the failure of the landscape not by escaping it but by performing joy within it.
This photograph inverts the lazy stereotypes perpetuated about Valleys towns: lost, dead, forgotten, unemployed, violent, redundant. Media narratives and a peculiar nostalgia for tough, unrelenting pasts of subservience to power and industry have calcified these places as finished. Schneidermann challenges that. The children aren't victims of decline or symbols of loss. They're dressed in high fashion, staging a party in condemned space, refusing the narrative that says this place and these people are over.
The photograph is choreographed. Schneidermann organised this party, positioned the children, framed the shot. It's not documentary capturing spontaneous life, it's constructed performance making a deliberate argument. The performance is political: defiance and aspiration staged in a landscape that has been plundered and left to fail. Merthyr Vale sits in the shadow of Aberfan, where 144 people, 116 of them children, died in 1966 when a colliery spoil tip collapsed onto the village. The Valleys have been written off repeatedly, declared finished, left to collapse. This photograph insists otherwise.
What's left for the future? These children, this energy, this refusal. The street is gone now, demolished. But the performance captured here makes a claim: the Valleys are not dead, they are being killed. And before erasure, there is defiance. The decorations, the fashion, the gathering itself, all of it declares presence where absence has been decided. The landscape has been condemned, but the children have not.
Clémentine Schneidermann (b. 1991, Paris) is a photographer based between Cardiff and Paris whose work combines social documentary and fashion photography.
More on Schneidermann: Website
