Portraits of place

How best to capture a specific location at a specific point in time? For photographer Walter Waygood, working in Merthyr Tydfil in the early 1980s, the answer was to focus not on places but people. The portraits of local people in his Family Of Merthyr series convey both the tribal youth cultures of the period and the sense of shared community. Inspiration for Clementine Schneidermann and The South Wales Project, among others, I'd imagine.

On a similar note, British-born Richard Beaven has set himself the task of photographing as many residents of his adopted home town, Ghent in New York State, as possible.