Beneath the surface of pictures lie the extensive networks of relationships and associations that tie us to them, sometimes in extraordinary ways. In pictures the past lives, and forms the basis of who we will become.

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 fifteen 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 the general public.

Peter Lord took a degree in Fine Art at Reading University in 1970. He was a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for British Art in 1994, and subsequently research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies from 1996-2003. From 2007-10 he was research fellow at CREW, Swansea University. He has published and broadcast extensively on the visual culture of Wales in both Welsh and English languages, and curated major exhibitions for national institutions. Between 1998 and 2003 he published the three volumes of The Visual Culture of Wales, which is regarded as the authoritative text on the subject. It was followed by The Tradition: a New History of Welsh Art 1400-1990, which in 2017 was Wales Non-fiction Book of the Year. His most recent publication, collaborating with Rhian Davies, The Art of Music: Branding the Welsh Nation, was also published by Parthian.