The last day of the Port Talbot steel works captured in the picture

“You’ll open the window one morning and it won’t look like Port Talbot.”

Photographer Jon Pountney said he remembers thinking “what is this?” he first saw a steel mill, driving on the M4 to a party in Swansea in 1998.

He has been one of the photographers allowed regular access to be taken in closure of Tata Steel’s blast furnacewith the expected switch off there ended the traditional way of steelmaking in Wales.

“As an outsider, you just go in and think, ‘I don’t know how to respond to what I’m seeing because it’s incredible’, and as a photographer it’s quite difficult because you’re also trying to concentrate on the image,” he said.

Her current project, The Allure or Ruins, focuses on post-industrial relics and the landscape of Wales – or “the old stuff”, as she puts it.

But he said it was also an opportunity to tell Tata’s story in “real time” and to “document things that will never happen again”.

“I do not know what to expect, and you basically meet with a very large dark room where there is a river of molten metal running through the middle.”

“You’ve never seen anything like it – it’s an incredible volcanic element, which is quite scary,” he said.

The visual artist also said that the sense of pride among the workers is “very, very real” when you enter the site.

“People are very professional and respect each other, and the things they do, which is very dangerous,” he said.

Photographer Mark Griffiths describes his “close connection” to the city, growing up in Port Talbot and having family and friends who worked in steel mills or parts of the surrounding infrastructure.

The 43-year-old said he wanted to make a short film called The Beginning of the Endtells the story of a society facing an uncertain future.

“The ripple effect is going to be phenomenal. It’s not just the steel workers that are going to be affected, it’s the infrastructure around them, the local businesses, the communities that are going to be damaged and destroyed by this.”

“I think it’s important to do this,” he said.

As part of the film, he spoke to local MP Stephen Kinnock, a mental health charity, a trade union representative and a business owner in the city.

“I have a close relationship with a lot of people in Port Talbot – my uncle, my wider family, friends who have at some point worked in parts of the steelworks, either directly or in the surrounding infrastructure, so it’s true. It’s hard to hear the story.

“Port Talbot has what I think of as a valley mentality, because we’re one giant family, everyone looks out for each other,” he said.

The photographer hopes his work will keep the city’s story in people’s minds, and encourage those in power to monitor the community as well.

For Jon, there was a strange sense of déjà vu, as he documented the fictional demise of the town’s steel mill as a production photographer for it Michael Sheen drama The Way last year.

Set in Port Talbot, it tells the story of civil unrest and fears surrounding the closure of a fictional steel mill and is described by the actor as “strangely close to the truth”.

Although Jon sees a more hopeful picture for the city’s future than what is portrayed on screen.

“It has to do with the pragmatism of the Welsh people, even in bad times, like the miners’ strike, ideas like this will continue.

“We will have order, we will have society, we will take care of each other, and we will move forward, and tomorrow will be a better day,” he said.