Grinning broadly with gappy teeth, their grubby clothes consonant with the crumbling edifices around them, a gaggle of seven effervescent children pose for the camera. You wonder what instruction the photographer, Marian Delyth, gave them, to make them laugh so much, and why one of them ended up doing a Superman pose.
The premise of the “poor children in a derelict urban context” photograph is a hackneyed one. Delyth is not glib about it, but her view is both loose and lively, silly and serious, offering an image of urbanisation and poverty that is hard to read. This quality persists in 50 years of pictures – some of which are on show at Delyth’s modestly sized retrospective at Ffotogallery, Cardiff, the major attraction of Ffoto Cymru, Wales’s biennial international photography festival.
