Newport Zooport
Ron McCormick, Communimedia, £20

I FIRST met the Liverpudlian photographer Ron McCormick (born 1947) in 1970, after being much impressed by his exhibition in Whitechapel Library, evocatively called “Neighbours,” which portrayed brilliantly with realism, pathos, humour and the deepest of humanity the people with whom he lived in Whitechapel and Spitalfields in east London.

We worked together in creating the children’s poetry anthology Stepney Words (1971), the fusion of my school students’ poems with Ron’s often startling photographs, each one telling a story. Ron was a frequent visitor to my Stepney classroom, using his images to stimulate the children’s imaginations towards a deep empathy with their human subjects and the most creative and compassionate words.

Since those days, Ron has become among the greatest and most expressive of British documentary photographers, his eternally snapping camera forging community galleries, educational initiatives and exhibitions in Newcastle and Sheffield, Oldham, Southend, Perth — Western Australia, Southampton and since 1979 his home city in Newport, South Wales, arriving there during a crucial era of the closure of the huge British Steel works at Llanwern on the outskirts of the city, and the subsequent repeated blows to the local economy.

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A new collection of McCormick’s black and white photographs, Newport Zooport, is a powerful portrait of the people and places of the Welsh city. The images are full of his characteristic narrative, zest, human eccentricity and profound consciousness of working class life and contingencies.

Here are its people laughing, crying, sleeping rough, playing, drinking, gesticulating, socialising, resting and working, each finely constructed image telling a hard urban story. Empty, derelict shops and centres, youths — many of them unemployed — playing in the streets, getting high, dressing up, leaving messages for sweethearts: the elderly staggering, waiting for buses, feeding birds on the banks of the River Usk.

It is a cosmopolitan, struggling city populace that McCormick exposes and praises, laments and rejoices with.

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Which are my favourite picture-stories? The gig economy Deliveroo cyclists waiting outside McDonald’s; the “Wild West” drinkers on the High Street pavement outside Hogarth’s Bar; the young Asian mother with her phone and children along Commercial Street; the old man with his right boot off, sitting on a bench at Newport Bus Station. They are all the denizens of a struggling Welsh city seeking to keep afloat in the storms of now-times, and they are typical McCormick: witty, communal, elegiac, and skilfully crafted with their blood-red human insight.

As McCormick says: “It’s true, Newport has real problems, but it also has amazing assets, among which are its people. It’s a great historic town.”

Of course, the spirit of the Chartist rising of 1839 still runs through the heart of the city, and McCormick expresses that in his depictions of its people’s lives. They show, once again, again why photography is still an essential means of exposing the true soul of the working people, especially when they are being starved of work.

Newport Zooport is available from communimedia.bigcartel.com 
The exhibition Newport Zooport runs until July 5 at Sipping Tinnys Bar, 11 High Street, Newport.