The Amateur Pornographer is a bawdy, warm-hearted comic novel about a failing art student who is taught how to be an artist by a working-class community more demanding - and more entertaining - than his tutors.
It is 1969-ish, and Alwyn is a penniless Welsh student at a prestigious London art school. Unfortunately, alcohol and hashish have harmed his creative output. After spending a frantic night photographing workers on the Underground, he hurriedly develops his pictures without fixing them properly. During his assessment, each and every photo literally fades before his tutors' eyes. And he left the borrowed camera on a train. Alwyn's formidable tutor - who still believes he might possess some talent - gives him a last chance. He must return after the summer with a new portfolio. She loans him an expensive camera.
Unable to afford London, Alwyn retreats to his parents' home in Wales. After the VW bus carrying him and a collection of stoned hippies loses a wheel, Alwyn wakes in hospital to discover that he's managed to lose another camera.
Back home, his long hair and hippy clothes horrify his father, the local barber, and attract Dolan, an officious policeman who is the town's new Drug Squad. Alwyn's mother, hoping to marry him off to a nice local girl, persuades his father to employ him. The arrangement lasts until lunchtime, by which point Alwyn has cut a child's ear and lost money from the till.
Desperate for cash, Alwyn takes a job in a mill where terrifying saws chew enormous timbers. Initially dismissed as a useless long-hair, he becomes popular when his workmates discover that he can take and print photographs.
Invited by a millworker to 'do some photographics, ' Alwyn expects to take a family portrait. Instead, he finds himself photographing the man's wife in intimate poses. Shocked, embarrassed and completely out of his depth, Alwyn nevertheless produces pictures far better than those of his predecessor. Word spreads, and soon every husband in the mill wants Alwyn to photograph his wife.
What begins as a furtive and potentially sordid sideline becomes unexpectedly revealing. The sessions expose embarrassment, vanity, sexual confidence, marital fantasy and the unvarnished realities of working-class life. Alwyn begins to see his subjects not as bodies but as people and without noticing, starts to become a genuine photographer.
Meanwhile, Dolan wages a campaign against the local pubs and workingmen's club while growing suspicious of Alwyn's clandestine activities. When Alwyn and his friends discover that the married policeman is having an affair, they contrive to photograph Dolan in a compromising position and display the evidence publicly: .
Enlarged to billboard size, with Dolan's lover carefully obscured, it appears above the town market. Dolan is humiliated, the town is delighted and Alwyn becomes an unlikely folk hero.
Alwyn returns to London with his summer portfolio. Enlarged and displayed on the college walls, the photographs no longer resemble amateur pornography. They are funny, tender and humane portraits of women, marriages and working-class domestic life.
Despite his incompetence and almost heroic capacity for disaster, Alwyn has finally created art.
