Llangollen Community Book

Llangollen Community - http://llangollencommunity.co.uk - over 100 clubs, societies and organisations in 144 page colour photography book.

Having lived in Llangollen for over 30 years, we’ve been fascinated by the diversity of clubs and societies our relatively small town has to offer the community.

When visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and confronted with Rembrandt’s group portraits, in particular “The Night Watch”, Simon was reminded of certain groups and personalities in Llangollen. Local characters seemed to be living within the 371 year old painting.

It seemed rather an intriguing idea to try to apply Rembrandt’s dramatic lighting technique photographically, to record our various clubs, groups and societies - a pictorial, documented history of people and their activities laid down for posterity, providing both an historical record of our Town and a fascinating guide for visitors.

We experimented with lighting using a group of neighbours and were pleasantly pleased with the result. This gave us the confidence to go ahead and contact groups and societies.

We started by using the seemingly comprehensive list on the Denbighshire County Council website but soon realised that a true “community” record should include not only all the clubs and societies but also our public services:
firemen, police, postmen, health-care professionals, librarians and so on.

However, as we started our project, the number of groups and societies grew wildly beyond our original estimates.
It seemed that with every group we photographed, two more emerged with our estimate of 30-40 groups turning out to be wholly inaccurate.

With this revelation it became apparent that we would have to restrict numbers or face shooting portraits indefinitely. We decided to focus on the management committees as representatives of the larger groups. For example we did not, as first intended, photograph the three bands of the Llangollen Silver Band but their management committee instead. We also photographed those figures central to the running of the many sports teams in Llangollen, but sadly not the players.

Despite the challenges along the way - faulty lights, snow storms, changing locations, sleepless nights and countless hours on telephones, e-mails and in front of computer screens - we have created something that we hope will live on and maybe even inspire more people to get involved with these groups or perhaps form new ones.

What you hold is a record of the social life of a town.
A portrait of how varied and rich an experience of living in a small town can be if you simply reach out to find like-minded individuals.

We hope to see you for the second edition!

Simon Collinge and Andrew Gale

Tags: Community Organization