Beneath the surface of pictures lie the extensive networks of relationships and associations that tie us to them, sometimes in extraordinary ways. The moments at which we come to understand something of ourselves and our place in the world are often anchored in images--literary, musical, and visual. Through 15 pictures, Peter Lord describes the evolution of his own sense of self, in childhood just after the Second World War, at art college in the 1960s, through the tension between incomers and local people in Wales in the 1970s and 80s, and finally through his exploration of the place they have had in the lives of the artists who created them, their patrons and publics. Writing about the meaning of pictures in their social and political context, Peter Lord was centrally involved in the establishment of the field in Wales in the 1980s, when the prevailing conventional wisdom regarded the nation as being largely devoid of a visual culture.

Peter Lord is a writer who has published 12 studies on various aspects of the subject of visual culture, including the three volumes of The Visual Culture of Wales, regarded as the standard work on the subject. He wrote and presented a seven-part series about Welsh visual culture, The Big Picture, for BBC Wales and was a visiting scholar at the British Art Center at Yale.