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Tom Mathias's photographic career flourished between the late 1880s and the early 1920s. Like most photographers of his day, he made his livelihood from portraiture and the recording of important family occasions. The collection abounds with photographs of weddings, christenings and family groups. The local gentry families, for which the Teifi valley was famed, also proved to be a fruitful source of income for Mathias. Families such as the Gowers of Castle Malgwyn, the Morgan Richardsons of Cilrhue and the Colbys of Ffynone feature prominently in the collection. Interestingly enough, much of his work for the gentry was not confined to portraits of family members, but also included photographs of their homes, their leisure interests and their servants. Tom Mathias's camera captured life below as well as above stairs.

A significant proportion of the photographs in the collection, however, have no obvious commercial motive and appear to have been taken purely for the photographer's pleasure. Indeed, some of his best photographs fall into this particular category and they portray everyday scenes in the Cilgerran area. Cilgerran in Tom Mathias's day was extremely fertile ground for the documentary photographer. Far from being a quiet village, it was a thriving industrial and commercial centre. During the late nineteenth century, over a dozen slate quarries operated in the neighbourhood providing employment for hundreds of men. Mathias was clearly fascinated by the quarryman's work, and some of his most striking photographs are of the quarries.

Cilgerran was also an important salmon fishery and was one of the main centres of coracle fishing in Wales. These small wicker-work boats must have been a familiar sight in the village and a number of coracle makers are known to have lived in the neighbourhood. Surprisingly, however, relatively few photographs of coracles appear in the collection. Given Tom Mathias's interest in everything around him, it is likely that photographs of coracle fishermen were taken but that the negatives have subsequently been lost.

Following Tom Mathias's death in 1940 all his negatives were dumped in an outhouse at Aberdyfan where they remained until the house was sold, following the death of his son James Mathias in the early 1970s. Their survival and ultimate discovery was then the result of a series of fortunate coincidences. The new owners of Aberdyfan happened to mention the existence of negatives to Maxi Davis because they were aware of his interest in photography. When Maxi first saw the collection the negatives were in very poor condition having been neglected for over thirty years. Many had broken, others had been damaged beyond repair and most of the remainder were very badly degraded. Enough had survived, however and Maxi Davis took on the daunting task of salvaging the Tom Mathias Collection.

Cleaning and stabilizing the glass negatives was an extremely painstaking and time-consuming process. Once the negatives had been prepared, printing was an equally slow process. Each negative had to be printed by hand and several attempts were often necessary in order to produce an acceptable print. Fortunately, the vast majority of the negatives processed ultimately provided remarkably clear images. Some of the less well-preserved negatives have also been included in the album pages, to show the magnitude of the task which Davis faced and to demonstrate the remarkable degree of success which he achieved.

The collection is a tribute to Tom Mathias's qualities as a photographer. His photographs demonstrate a keenness of eye and a technical clarity seldom achieved by better-known photographers using far more sophisticated equipment. Even in the very restrictive genre of portraiture and family photographs he demonstrates an originality of approach which frequently enabled him to overcome the artificiality of the situation, and to capture the humanity and personality of his subjects. In this he was undoubtedly helped by the fact that he never owned a studio and most of his photographs had to be taken out of doors. He was compelled to arrange his shots very carefully, giving due consideration to the background of each photograph, and was never in a position to produce the stereotyped photographs of many studio-based photographers. According to those who knew him, Tom Mathias exercised infinite patience in setting up his shots and nowhere is his patience better rewarded than in his splendidly informal photographs of children with whom he had a special rapport.

What pervades all of Mathias's photographs is his love of people and his empathy with those who lived around him. Whether by chance or design he provided us with an unequalled record of the life and work of the ordinary people of one small part of Wales at the turn of the century. It is to be hoped that this book is a fitting tribute to his remarkable talent and will serve to bring his photographs to the attention of a wider public, and provide him with the recognition his work so richly deserves.

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