When he was serving in the US Signal Corps in 1956, the celebrated photographer Bruce Davidson was posted to Paris. He served there under a sergeant who was Welsh. Davidson was due three days’ leave and he asked the sergeant where on earth he would send his own worst enemy. The sergeant replied without hesitation “Cwmcarn”, a mining village in the Ebbw Valley. On that first visit, Davidson underestimated how long it would take to get to Cwmcarn and had to leave before he could take any pictures, to avoid being awol. But in a couple of hours, he was able to take in a sense of “the coal dust and the flesh, of the sweat and the danger” of the miners’ lives. “There was something beautiful about a life that was so horrible,” he has said.

It was another nine years before Davidson returned to Cwmcarn, by which time he had become famous for his revolutionary images of American subcultures and gangs, and for his indelible up-close images from the frontlines of the civil rights movement. He hadn’t forgotten Cwmcarn, however, and finding himself in Wales on a magazine assignment to photograph Caernarfon Castle, he made his way back there.

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Most of the pictures Davidson took on that second visit were of working miners, but he also wandered the terraced streets of the village and surrounding towns. He was trying to find a good vantage point for the sulphurous smoke that was pouring out of the industrial chimneys when he came across this child. “A lot of people think it’s a boy but it’s actually a girl,” Davidson has said of the image, which is included in a new exhibition of his British photography. “I don’t think you’d find many boys in a mining town pushing a baby carriage like that. They wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Bruce Davidson: A United Kingdom runs from Friday until 14 March at Huxley-Parlour, London W1