John Briggs

John Briggs was born in 1947 in St Paul, Minnesota. He came to Wales in the 1960s to study at Atlantic College in the Vale of Glamorgan, where an increasing passion for photography resulted in his first street images of Cardiff. He gained a degree in French at the University of Minnesota, also working as a part-time reporter. In 1947, returning to Wales to do teacher training at University College, Cardiff, he began systematically photographing the city’s disappearing docklands.

Briggs’s books include Before the Deluge, Taken in Time and Newportrait. He has also published Walking Cardiff and Walking the Valleys in collaboration with Peter Finch.