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Author/s: Justin Carville The Politics of Place, Space and Landscape in Irish Photography During the first collapse of Northern Ireland's devolved Legislative Assembly, former United States President Bill Clinton offered a comment on the opposing nationalist and unionist parties involved that prompted a short-lived but derisive commentary from those journalists who had followed Clinton's role in the Northern Ireland peace process. [1] In obvious frustration at the inability of the Ulster Unionist Party led by David Trimble, and Sinn Fein, led by Gerry Adams, to reach a compromise that would see the full implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Clinton remarked, "they're like a couple of drunks walking out of the bar for the last time, when they get to the swinging door they turn around and go back in and say, 'I just can't quite get there,'" [2] The subsequent media attention to these remarks led to a succession of claims by journalists that Clinton had resorted to racial stereotypes of drunken Irish-ness to express his displeasure at the ongoing political stalemate taking place across th e Atlantic. Clinton's peculiar brand of "paddy-whackery" has a well documented history and offered nothing new to the lexicon of stereotypes that already exist to describe Ireland and its citizens, the irony is however that these stereotypes have historically originated from the print media itself. [3] Despite efforts by some sections of the international media to make journalistic capital out of Clinton's remarks, the reaction of the Irish media was much more subdued. [4] Indeed the reaction of most of the Irish public was one of perplexed amusement at the fuss that was being made over such a banal comment. Unfortunate as Clinton's choice of metaphor was it was no worse than what had come before. What had been interpreted as racial stereotyping by certain sections of the international and U.S. media had been recognized as an inability to articulate an ongoing complex political situation by the Irish public. The metaphors, euphemisms and discourse used by foreign affairs spokespeople and the western media have frequently fallen back on stereotypical images of Ireland in their frustration to articulate the complexities of Irish historical and political life. What Clinton and other foreign observers of what has been labeled "The Troubles" have failed to grasp is that the discourses used to describe the shift s in Irish politics need to be re-negotiated in an ongoing basis. In relation to the current political situation in Northern Ireland (even though politicians from both sides of the unionist and nationalist divide speak of an everlasting peace and a complete cessation of sectarian violence) what is taking place is a peace process, a process that has and will continue to be reviewed and negotiated for some time to come. It is, however, not just the political situation in Northern Ireland that faces these continual re-negotiations. A broad spectrum of political, historical and cultural practices are continually re-negotiated as a result of massive upheavals brought about by unprecedented economic prosperity and immigration throughout the whole of Ireland. Images of economic prosperity and peace, however, remain alien to those who have viewed Ireland through the two portholes of urban conflict and rural idyll. Such representations after all have been the dominant images of Ireland since the rise of colonial tourism and the uprisings of 1798 and 1916. [5] These representations have for the most part been produced [and distributed by outside media agencies, either through journalistic representations of Northern Ireland or high production value publications of the Irish landscape aimed at the diaspora. With these dominant representations emanating from outside cultural representative practices, Irish artists and photographers h ave been left with no alternative but to re-articulate representations of Ireland in terms of these outside media influences. That is to say, artists and photographers have not discarded the remnants of images of Ireland's past in their attempts to represent the changes taking place in the Irish political and social landscape. Rather, these representations form the basis of a re-negotiated territory that sets out to counter the dominant representations of Ireland that exist in western culture. |
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I use the phrase re-negotiated territory here, to put in place a frame of reference to address the practices of a number of Irish photographers who have approached the representation of space and place through a direct engagement with the changing political and philosophical discourses associated with Irish identity. This re-negotiation can be identified as threefold. Firstly, it is a re-negotiation of the territory of photographic practice that sets out to critically engage with the political economy of photographic representations of Ireland. This does not just entail a re-negotiation of the politics of representation, it also sets out to open up the way in which the viewer encounters these representations. Secondly, it is a re-negotiation of the way space is represented in the photographic image. Space in Ireland is shaped by particular ideologies that are fixed in the prevailing discourses of unionism and nationalism and the photographers discussed in this essay are aware of the role of the photographic image in constructing space in relation to identity. Their re-negotiation of space is not to "reshape" it but rather to open it up to multiple and contesting narratives. Thirdly, their work sets out to re-negotiate the dominant discourses used to describe the representation of Irish history, politics and culture. That is to say, by opening up the representation of space and place, their work allows for alternative, contested and frequently unspoken narratives of identity to be expressed through their work. The term group is used loosely in relation to these photographers here. The intent is to concentrate on only three photographers and specific bodies of work, Paul Seawright's "Sectarian Murder" (1988) and "Police Force" (1998) series, Anthony Haughey's ongoing series, "Disputed Territory," begun in 1998 and David Farrell's ongoing series, "Sites," begun in 1999. There are a number of other photographers (most notably Victor Sloan and John Duncan), whose work addresses similar issues albeit through different strategies. The latter's "Be Prepared" (1999) series in particular uses allegory, a strategy that is central to the re-negotiation of territory by the photographers discussed in this paper, to de-contextualize the urban spaces of Belfast's city fringes. [6] The work of Duncan and Sloan as well as that by two of the photographers addressed in this essay have been discussed, albeit in different contexts, in two group exhibitions and catalogs, "The Lie of the Land" and "Revealing Views," and I do not wish to retrace previously explored issues. [7] I focus on the work of Seawright, Haughey and Farrell as I consider their work to be most closely linked to the threefold strategy of re-negotiation outlined above. Photography, allegory and re-negotiation Within the mass media, the photographic image has been the dominant form of stereotypical representations of Ireland and it is these photographic representations that form the counterpoint to this re-negotiated territory. The extent to which the photographic image has become a contested issue in Ireland was illustrated during Clinton's visit to Belfast in 1998 when Sinn Fein successfully obscured from the rest of the world's media the moment when the U.S. president shook Adams's hand outside Sinn Fein offices on the Falls Road. The only photograph taken was by Sinn Fein's PR officer, who had control of its subsequent reproduction and distribution. This incident highlights the extent to which the political economy of the mass media is embedded in the discourses of the current political situation. The same observation can also be made regarding those Irish photographers and artists discussed here who engage with the representation of space and landscape. The issue at stake for many Irish photographers and artis ts is not just the politics of representation, but the political context in which the viewing public encounters these representations. It is significant that many of the photographers involved in contesting these dominant images of Ireland have worked within the documentary tradition that has been responsible for the production and distribution of this dominant imagery. This particular mode of documentary by Irish photographers might be referred to as a critical documentary practice. It is critical in the sense that it interrogates the documentary mode of representation, and the subjects that have become the focus of visiting documentary photographers and photojournalists. [8] This re-negotiated practice is thus a re-articulation of the altruistic ideals of traditional documentary photography as well as the subject matter that dominates documentary imagery of Ireland. |
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Before going on to discuss the work of Irish photographers, I want to briefly discuss the dominant mode of representation their work sets out to re-negotiate. Photographic representations of Northern Ireland have, since the civil unrest of the late 1960s and early '70s, revolved around two specific areas: documentary humanism and conflict photography. [9] The print media, particularly picture magazines and the British tabloid newspapers have been at the forefront of distributing the latter type of imagery. [10] During the initial years of civil unrest, photographs of Northern Ireland in picture magazines in particular were similar to the types of combat photography that the public had been accustomed to since the Korean and Vietnam Wars. [11] During 1970 and 1971 Life magazine ran three picture stories on Northern Ireland that focused predominately on confrontations between the nationalist community and British troops. In September 1970, Lift ran the story, "A Classic Scene of Irish Violence," that featured a double-page panoramic shot of a confrontation between nationalists from William Street in Derry and British troops in riot gear. The accompanying caption gives a sense of the editorial stance taken on the subject: In this picture a classic street-fighting situation has developed. Angry Catholics from the Bogside section have attacked soldiers on the fringes of the area, and the soldiers are moving in to contain them. A few rioters gather behind barrels in an empty lot where a betting shop was burnt down in last year's riots. But some soldiers outflanked them and soon had the area cleared. [12] Here we have the familiar empathizing of the reporter with the fate of the combat soldier who, despite facing extreme hostility, succeeds in subduing the violent mob threatening to disrupt civil society. The title and caption alone clearly equates violence with Irish identity as opposed to the British troops who are portrayed as bringing stability to the violence taking place in the province. To refer to the confrontation as classic "violence" somehow infers that what is taking place is merely a re-enactment of past traditions, a continuation of the country's heritage rather than a response to increasing frustrations with social, political and ideological inequality. The position taken by Life's editors is clearly, in John Taylor's terms, the "official perspective," a correspondence that suits the purposes of both the media and the State. [13] This argument is no doubt familiar to readers, but the currency of such imagery in the political economy of media portrayal of Northern Ireland is such that it is wort h repeating if only to highlight the ideological rhetoric behind representations of Ireland that contemporary Irish photographers seek to contest. This example from Life offers us material for historical salvage, however, because within the rhetoric lays the fundamental problem behind media representations of Northern Ireland. The scene is represented as an isolated act of extremist mob violence. Like the troops in the photograph, the journalistic discourse moves in to contain the scene, isolating it from what came before. This confrontation is treated like other seemingly random acts of terrorism in the mass media, dislocated from the cultural and political history behind the conflict. [14] |
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Life attempted to readdress this in a subsequent photostory with an accompanying article by Loudon Wainwright that attempted to deal with the reasons behind the violence taking place in 1970 and 1971. [15] While Wainwright's article and the accompanying photographs represented the upheavals in both Protestant and Catholic communities, and to some extent attempted to attribute the social conditions of these communities to the rising conflict between them, they avoided the fundamental issue behind the conflict. Like the previous photo-essay it failed to point out that beneath the unrest in both communities was a frustration at the obstacles they faced in attempting to establish their identity within the territorial spaces of Northern Ireland's urban centers. The photograph of nationalists clashing with the British army in Derry was not simply an isolated act of riotous contempt for British authority, but part of a wider conflict over control and freedom of movement within a particular territorial space. Yet as titles such as that of Clive Limpkin's 1972 book Battle of the Bogside suggest, it has been the norm for the conflict to be represented through the discourse of terrorism, crime and war. Media representations often present the conflict as purely a Protestant and Catholic divide rather than a conflict over civil rights and a desire to establish territorial boundaries in which to express nationalist and unionist identity. [16] The cultural critic Luke Gibbons has drawn attention to the transformative capacity of culture in Ireland, that is to say culture's ability to alter the social conditions under which we interpret representations of Irish history and politics. [17] Writing of the transformative capacity of Irish culture and its relationship with the weight of tradition of Irish literary criticism, Gibbons states: Cultural representations do not simply come after the event, "reflecting" experience or embellishing it with aesthetic form, but significantly alter and shape the ways we make sense of our lives. This would be unproblematic were it not for the fact that to make culture a material force in this way is often construed as an attack on the autonomy of art. For culture to be effective as "equipment for living," in Kenneth Burke's phrase, it has to be grounded in the material conditions of society, but this runs counter to those familiar currents within literary and cultural criticism which, under various invocations of "the aesthetic," see the creative imagination as entirely transcending its social and political circumstances, gathering itself up, as Yeats expressed it, into "the artifice of eternity." [18] To transform something, particularly identity whether national or sexual, is to perhaps suggest an unequivocal fixity and closure as an outcome of this transformative process. After all, such outcomes are, as Gibbons suggests, the desires of those subaltern cultures wishing to gain recognition by emulating their masters in the imperial center. [19] I would suggest, however, that the transformative capacity of culture is dependent upon those forms of cultural practice being open to continuing re-negotiation. Indeed, as Gibbons goes on to state, often embedded within these totalizing images of cultural and national identity are alternative and more complex narratives. Where Gibbons's formulation of the transformative capacity of culture is most forceful is in his insistence on the allegorical function of Irish culture as an instrument of cultural transformation. The centrality of allegory in formulations of cultural identity in Ireland is particularly pertinent to a discussion on Irish photography because what I wish to argue is that what links the photographic practices discussed in this essay is the use of allegory as a strategy to re-negotiate the representation of space and place within the context of cultural identity in Ireland. |
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Allegory has of course been given a central place in conceptualizations of postmodernist art practice. [20] Writing in the journal October, Craig Owens discusses the allegorical structure of reading one text through another: Conceived in this way, allegory becomes the model of all commentary, all critique, insofar as these are involved in rewriting a primary text in terms of its figural meaning. I am interested, however, in what occurs when this relationship takes place within works of art, when it describes their structure. Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And in his hands the image becomes something other [sic]. He does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured; allegory is not hermeneutics. Rather, he adds another meaning to the image. If he adds, however, he does so only to replace: the allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one; it is a supplement. [21] Owens goes on to identify the link between allegory and postmodernist art as those practices that use appropriation, site specificity, strategies of accumulation, impermanence, hybridization and discursivity The work discussed here uses similar strategies in divergent ways. The allegorical structure of reading one text through another is a central aspect of the work done by the three photographers discussed here. The strategy employed, however, does not just involve the establishment of a critical relationship between texts, it also incorporates the opening up of the image as a site through which the viewer can formulate contesting narratives. Seawright articulated this strategy succinctly when interviewed after winning the Irish Museum of Modern Art's Glen Dimplex award in 1997. Commenting on his photograph of a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer's head, highlighting a radio ear piece, from the series "Police Force," Seawright recalled how one review outside of Ireland interpreted the image as being about the darkness of surveillance, describing the ear piece as being a beetle-like creature burrowing in the ear of the RUC officer. The RUC, however, wanted to use the photograph on the over of their Police Beat magazine because they saw the image as being about the discomfo rt of wearing a surveillance device. The reading of the image by the print media sector of Northern Ireland's security forces can be seen in many respects to be a diffusing of the more overt rhetoric of the image as commentary on the furtiveness of institutionalized surveillance. This is not to suggest that such a reading is any less real or valid; indeed what this example demonstrates is that the image as allegory is in need of completion by the viewer. As Seawright describes it, "A lot of the meaning is constructed within the image as people look at it. A lot happens right there." [22] This strategy does not just incorporate the parody or direct quotation of prior texts, but uses everyday objects as the basis of its allegorical structure. Formulations of alternative narratives to describe representations of Northern Ireland are not forced upon the viewing public, but originate from the contextualized encounters between the viewer and the image. I would suggest that what distinguishes the use of allegory in Irish photography from those postmodernist art practices discussed by Owens is that they employ an allegory of the everyday. I would, contend that an allegory, of the everyday-incorporates the use of everyday objects, banal and frequently arbitrary fragments to rescue those histories and narratives of subaltern groups that are in danger of disappearing under the weight of traditional and totalizing images of nationalist and unionist identity. By using the everyday as an allegorical strategy, such work opens up space for interpretation to take place in the process of analysis. In the fina l section of his Trauerspeil study, Walter Benjamin remarked, "If it is to hold its own against the tendency-to absorption, the allegorical must constantly unfold. in-new and surprising ways." [23] In its resistance to closure, an allegory of the everyday opens the image to a continual and contested re-negotiation, working. against any predetermined and formulaic modes of analysis. In its embrace of the everyday as the vehicle through which contested readings can be recognized and acknowledged, recent Irish photography actively sets out to re-negotiate the territorial spaces of photographic practice and discourse. From this perspective, it is important that the photographic works discussed here are- not viewed as outside of the material forces of culture, distanced from the social realities of Irish life. The aim of the artists and photographers discussed in this essay is not merely to present alternative images of Ireland, but through this act force the viewing public to rethink the narratives and discourses that have been used to. make sense of their own experiences of Irish history, politics and culture. |
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Space, place and landscape Identity in Northern Ireland over the last 30 years in particular has been articulated in terms of sectarianism. Its physical manifestation appearing in the painted curbstones, flags and murals that demarcate the borders of the two communities in working class areas of most towns and cities throughout Ulster. [24] These physical objects are part of the cultural imagery that binds people together into what Benedict Anderson terms "imagined communities," where signifiers of a territorial space offer -acceptance-with one hand and exclusion with -the other. [25] Paul Graham in his 1987 series "Troubled Land" represented this sectarian landscape in terms of the constructed borders between the nationalist and- unionist communities. [26] With its emphasis on painted curbstones, sectarian graffiti and murals, Graham's series used the local internal physical barriers of sectarian division as a metaphor for-the border between North-and South, the history of which legitimizes contemporary nationalist and unionist claims to territory. But it is a body of work by Seawright that brings to the fore a more sinister aspect of sectarian claims to territorial space. Seawright's series "Sectarian Murder" brought to the fore an aspect of sectarian division in Northern Ireland that had remained invisible to visiting photojournalists and documentary photographers like Graham. [27] While Graham had focused on the visible and concrete physical manifestations of sectarianism, Seawright attempted to represent -the ideological territorialism that sectarian murder instills in the two communities. Graham's "Troubled Land" however, was to prove a useful departure point for Seawrights "Sectarian Murder" series. As a former student of Graham, Seawright saw the series as failing to reflect his own experiences of growing up in a Protestant working-class area of North Belfast and took -a more autobiographical approach to the everyday-fears, of living in a community marked by conflicts over territory. [28] When sectarian murder is represented in- the print and broadcast-media, one of the overriding traits is-the focus on the identity of the victim, generally through--a passport-sytle photograph-or a heavily cropped family portrait. As a consequence, such-media representations tend to locate sectarian murder its victim and its in a immediate family of the deceased rather than the wider community. Sectarian murder, however, is a psychological form of markingout territory that has -a direct impact -on those who live and work within-the spaces where these acts are perpetrated. Thesites where sectariam murderstake place are locations where the spatial behaviors of groups in-deciding where to reside, work and recreate form-part of the process of acknowledging and expressing their identity. [29] Seawrights overriding concern, then, was to produce a body -of work that acknowledged the complex relationship between sectarian murder and the ambiguity of the geographical space where it took place. [30] The image Tuesday 10th January -1973, (1973) for example, illustrates some of the re-negotiations with media reporting, memory and space with which the series sought to engage. As with all the images in the series, the color photograph of- the site is accompanied by an account of the murder as reported in the media and the date it-took place. The text reads, "The car traveled to a deserted tourist spot known as the Giants Ring. The 14-year-old boy was made to kneel on the grass verge, his anorak was pulled over his head, then he was shot at dose range, dying instantly Like the other "Sectarian Murder" images, the caption lays bare-the plain facts of date, location and circumstances of the murders. Religious designations are removed from the text and each individual incident is represented as a seemingly ne utral act of murder. By its lack of information, the text distances the- individual homicides from the history of reprisals that area prominent feature-of sectarian murders. There is no emotive commentary,- no naming of the victims religion-or the paramilitary organization responsible for the killing. |
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The image itself represents. a Neolithic stone tomb in the foreground of a tourist spot known as the Giants Ring, a site once-used for pagan rituals. Here we have a doubling of strategies that attempt to decontextualize the specificity of sectarianism through a neutralizing of place. The representation of the location has an arbitrary relationship with the sectarian murder. There is nothing in the image to suggest anything sinister has taken place at this location-it is suspicious only by its very ordinariness. But the image creates a tension between past and present, landscape and memory. Sites such as- the Giants Ring were studied by a professional, largely Protestant middle class who used archaeology as a way to express their interest in all things Irish during the turn of the nineteenth century. [31] Seawrights image, however, attempts to show how the history and memory of space is re-negotiated through the effects of sectarian murder and conflict on- different communities. The Neolithic history of the G iants Ring studied by the Protestant middle class of the late Victorian, early Edwardian era bears no relation to the sectarian history of the site to the working-class communities of Belfast in the late twentieth century. The history of geographical spaces such as the Giants Ring are continually displaced as territory is claimed and reclaimed by histories of the conflict that exist in nationalist and unionist communities. As a response-to the dominant representations of sectarianism, Seawrights work- attempts to show how the physical and ideological. sectarian divisions between the communities impact upon and reinforce one another. The "Sectarian Murder" series sets out to challenge the viewer to confront the ideological and psychological territorialism that sectarian murder engenders in the communities affected. This form of sectarianism is impossible to represent as a tangible physical object, yet it is as visible to the working-class nationalist and unionist communities of Northern Ireland as the murals and flags that mark out-the territories of the two- communities. The tension that "Sectarian -Murders" attempts to create between the physical and psychological markers of territory is also part of there-negotiation of the dominant generalized narratives of reporting sectarian murder. A central aspect of the series is the role of the viewers and their knowledge of the space represented. This is not to say that interpretation is confined to parochial knowledge of place and its significance in terms of identity, but the connotations are deliberately. open-ended to allow for a dialogue between the- photographer, the image and the viewer in the generation of meaning. For those who reside and work within the communities that Seawright comes from, the image of the Giants Ring may well be a representation of a familiar landmark, but the fear and anxiety of sectarian murder, although never spoken openly, is never far away. Equally, for those viewers outside of Northern-Ireland and distanced from-the history of the conflict, the relationship-between text and image leaves the conno tations open to interpretation. Viewers frequently-struggle to associate- the religious affiliation of victims with the geographical, space represented in the image. The text supplies only part of the-narrative of the individual murders, and the exclusion of religion- attempts to confront viewers with the complexities of sectarian murder in Northern Ireland and their role in establishing territorial boundaries. |
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Seawright, in-an-obvious attempt to de-contextualize the specificity of place that is evident in his work on Northern Ireland,[has in his. two most recent series, "The Missing," (1997) and "Margins" (1999) removed any reference to the history -of the spaces represented. [32] "Margins," which was begun in Paris, references those spaces referred to-as the "terrain vague as well as Walter Benjamin's often repeated comment on Eugene Atget's photographs of Paris being like- the scene of a crime. [33] The large color photographs of what Seawright calls "malevolent spaces" in-various European cities represent the wasteland, underpasses and municipal. spaces that most people avoid, but that are the types of locations where the bodily remnants of crimes are- disposed of. [34] The series "The Missing which began with-the case of a Catholic murdered by the IRA and buried in Belfast's Black Mountains during the early years of "The Troubles," is in some respects the beginnings of his move away-from-the specificity of-Northern Ireland to more generic themes relevant to similar experiences in other communities. Every nation has its missing, either through ethnic cleaning, political conflict or domestic crime. In a strange act of transference, the case of the missing in Ireland brings us across the border, in terms of both geographic and photographic-territory. The disappearance from nationalist communities of predominantly Catholic residents believed to have been killed by the IRA remained a dark silent passage of the conflict in Northern Ireland throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century. Although the "disappeared" have been a common factor in many political conflicts throughout Latin, North American and-African nations, it has rarely trespassed on the vocabulary used to describe the conflict in Northern Ireland. The reported 14 individuals have remained the unhidden casualties of over 30 years of conflict. After years of denial, it was only in the beginning of 1999 that the IRA admitted its involvement in the abduction, murder and burial of nine nationalists throughout the 1970s. [35] In a strange attempt at catharsis eight of the "disappeared" were buried across the border in the Republic of Ireland, in the landscape that is a Romantic symbol of nationalist identity. Nationalists have viewed landscape in the Republic of Ireland as de-colonized and therefore by association pure, stable and homogeneous. In an act that sets out to destabilize this very narrow conception of the landscape, Farrell's series "Sites" depicts the physical transformations of space around the large-scale excavations for the bodies of the eight "disappeared." Farrell's series is in part a project to memorialize the eight "disappeared" and an attempt to foreground the multifarious registers of memory that are constituted by space and landscape. Through close-ups of material excavated in searches and references to conventions of landscape representation, Farrell's photographs of the sites of the "disappeared" show the physical traces left by the searches themselves and the impromptu memorials left by the families of the "disappeared" during their vigils at the sites. |
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Few memorials exist to acknowledge the unwilling victims of atrocities from both the North and the South. Indeed, as the journalist Fintan O'Toole has commented, contrasting Ireland's attempts to acknowledge atrocities with the memorial to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal office building in Oklahoma City, "The instinct has been to rebuild, repair and move on." [36] The memory of bombings and massacres tend as a result to rest with the families of victims or survivors rather than the dominant narratives of the conflict. Memorials in Ireland are invariably political and reflect the sectarianism prevalent in acts of commemoration. The commemoration of Remembrance Day for World War I for example is by and large regarded as a unionist ceremony in the North, a debt owed to unionists by Britain. [37] Its commemoration in the South has been marginalized through indifference toward the role of the Irish in the first World War and the priority of the state in commemorating the events of 1916 and 1922. [38] Memorials to the recent conflict have unsurprisingly largely been the preserve of paramilitary groups and are localized in the various territories of the two communities, either through wall murals or paramilitary graves such as the republican plot at Milltown cemetery in Belfast. There is in many respects a terrible irony in all this. The families of the "disappeared" still living in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland live among wall murals commemorating republican martyrs killed in the conflict while their own histories have remained unspoken and neglected. Stories of nationalists killing nationalists are still taboo in histories of the conflict, part of the amnesia present in most communities where the control of territory is marked by fear and intimidation. The irony has not been lost on at least one family member of the "disappeared." Helen McKendry, daughter of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 abducted and killed by the IRA in 1972 for coming to the aid of a dying British soldier, has spoken openly about the unwritten histories of the "disappeared." [39] On the prospect of burying her mother at the family grave in Milltown cemetery with a planned headstone inscription reading "Jean McConville disappeared and was subsequently murdered by the Provisional IRA in 1972," sh e stated, "When the tourists visit the IRA graves, I want them to see my mother's and ask questions about what happened to her. The 'disappeared' were part of Irish history whether the Provos like it or not. I don't want them ever forgotten." [40] This statement is a significant one, coming as it does from a member of the nationalist community. It signifies intent to force a re-negotiation of histories of the conflict on territory where the memories of nationalist struggles are articulated through Paramilitarism, Celtic icons and symbols of republican martyrdom. The prospect of such a memorial just yards from the republican plot is not a disavowal of the history of republican struggles, but an attempt to highlight the complex historical formations of contemporary Irish political culture. |
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The fact that such a memorial is not currently in place has less to do with a lack of closure for a family's grief than displaced memories of landscape. Despite the identification of six locations where the "disappeared" are said to have been buried, only two bodies have ever been recovered. It is these displaced memories of space and memorializing that converge in Farrell's series. By drawing heavily on a tradition of representing landscape in Ireland as an idealized rural idyll, Farrell's photographs draw attention to the fragmentary, overlapping and often silenced memories of landscape. The sites are represented as disrupted, invaded and sometimes renewed spaces. His photographs of the site at Templetown, Co. Louth, for the body of McConville which has never been discovered, show the changes to the landscape during various stages of the search. Farrell has noted how each time he visits a site, the changes require him to rethink and re-negotiate his approach to representing the landscape. [41] His diptych of the McConville site at Templetown for example, shows an undulating grass verge in the background and traces of heavy excavation machinery crisscrossing the foreground. The tracks do not quite match between two images in a metaphor for the displacement of place and the disruption of memory. The physical disruptions to space in Farrell's photographs work allegorically to describe the ruptures of memory and landscape. The diptych foregrounds the newly formed landscape caused by the disruptions of the present, but the stability of the past remains visible in the background. The disruption to the entrenched conventions of landscape imagery brings the past into direct confrontation with the present, interrupting the historical continuity of landscape and memory that exists in national culture. This is a resistance to those imagined conceptions of nationhood moving through what Anderson calls "homogeneous empty time," connecting people to parts of the country they have never had direct contact or association with. [42] Farrell's series is not an attempt to introduce the experiences of the "disappeared" and their families into the history of space but to de-historicize the totalizing narratives of landscape that exist in nationalist culture. Farrell also inverts the act of looking at the landscape through the picturesque gaze. As a well-known scenic spot, Templetown beach has been the destination for many tourists hoping to see the unpolluted picturesque Irish landscape. Farrell turns his lens away from the scenic site of the tourist's gaze into the site of grievous memory. [43] In another photograph, Iniskeen Co. Monaghan (2000), the site where two bodies of the disappeared were recovered, the picturesque gaze and grievous memory converge. A man stands surveying the picturesque landscape around him while simultaneously exhibiting his mastery of the natural world, an image that is repeated in the commodified imagery that structures and gives meaning to the tourist's romantic gaze. In the foreground, however, the mother of one of the "disappeared" kneels at a makeshift shrine in a quite moment of remembrance. The memorial to another more grievous memory of landscape interrupts the romantic tourist's gaze that shapes and gives stability to the col lective memories of landscape that exist in national culture. |
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Farrell's references to landscape and tourism within the context of the conflict in Northern Ireland are a timely diversion from the dominant approaches to the subject. As the peace process allows the tourist industry to expand, those spaces once used to signify territorial boundaries and sectarian identity are becoming locations for tourists wishing to experience post-conflict histories of sectarian division. Farrell is just one of a number of photographers from the Republic of Ireland who reference landscape as an important motif to critically engage with issues of space and identity. Photographers wishing to interrogate the nostalgia and ideology of the Irish landscape have contested this popular conception through references to the tourist imagery and heritage industries that promote and give stability to the image of Ireland as pre-modern rural idyll. What is significant about the landscape that is the subject of Farrell's photographs is that it is not only the discourses used to describe experiences of them that need to be re-negotiated, but the physical terrain itself has been altered. The landscape here is impermanent, the geological formations of the space disrupted through excavation. That space can be impermanent is an issue that provokes a crisis in dominant ideologies of sectarian identity that privilege exclusivity and sovereign territoriality. For more extreme factions of unionism and republicanism, conflict over territory constitutes a war of attrition, privileging a winner-takes-all agenda over political dialogue. Territorial division is clearly visible, defined and closed to negotiation. [44] Haughey's ongoing series "Disputed Territory" brings us to the border and to the spaces where lines of demarcation are at least ideologically quite clearly drawn. [45] Haughey's series is a timely exploration into contested terrain. In a time of increased European Federalism and the shift in rhetoric from the European Unions legislature in Brussels from nationalism to European regionalism, disputes over territory and sovereignty have taken on an added impetus and are very much at the front of European politics. Significantly Haughey's series does not just revolve around Ireland, it also incorporates the disputed territories of Bosnia, Kosovar and the Basque region of Spain, all parts of Europe that share with Ireland a conflict over territory and uneasy fractured moments of peace. Haughey's approach to this disputed space incorporates the representation of discarded remnants of human activity that may or may not be linked to conflict, optical surveillance devices that appear strangely detached from the natural world they monitor, and arbitrary spaces that make no overt reference to the conflict the series sets out to scrutinize. His concentration on the fragmentary, the ephemeral and the random is an allegorical technique that challenges any self-referential reading. The allegorical structure of the images force the viewer to look beyond the frame of the photograph, to search outside the prescribed references of photographic discourse. |
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The photograph Orange Barrier, Louth/Armagh Border (1998) demonstrates the extent to which the image is open to contested readings through the allegorical use of everyday objects. Let's begin with a simple description: There is an open field, and an orange plastic barrier supported by four poles stands in the middle. In the background, a mountain range is partly obscured by a hedgerow and trees. The sky is cloudy. There is no indication if the field of view is from south to north or north to south. Indeed, without the caption there would be no indication as to the precise location of the space recorded in the photographic image. There are oblique references to the conventions of landscape representation but none to conflict or any signs that this geological terrain is disputed territory. In the allegorical structure of the image, the individual objects and the relationship between them and any other objects or texts outside of the space framed by the photographic image can mean absolutely anything to anybody . [46] Allegory cuts across metaphor and metonymy, the image is both fragment and performs a figurative function. [47] Read through the context of the conflict over territory, the image is still open to multiple, fractured and contested analysis. The plastic barrier takes on significance outside of its everyday function. In its isolated position, it stands precariously supported by four poles that keep it intact. Metaphorically the barrier can be read as the isolation felt by sections of the unionist community who long for perceptible borders to distinguish territory. It can also be read as a metaphor for nationalist perceptions of the self-enclosed siege mentality of the Orange Order, a politically and ideologically motivated religious organization perceived by many nationalists as a barrier to freedom of movement or even unification, an obstacle to both paramilitary and political solutions to the conflict. Yet what are considered to be barriers for some are considered as protections by others. For many unionists, the border is not just a line not to be crossed from north to south, it is also a barrier to invasion from what are perceived to be marauding nationalists on the other side. These are rather extreme readings yet they are an essential feature of the rhetoric emanating from the polar ends of nationalism and unionism that have a vested interest in entrenched stereotypes. It would be wrong to become fixated on these polarized readings, however, since what is most subtly worked through in Haughey's series is that in the realities of day-to-day life the border region is much more porous and multifaceted than either nationalist or unionist discourses wish to acknowledge. Cartographically the border may be drawn as a clear, fixed line, but economic and social realities take little notice of marks left by the cartographer's hand. Urban territories may be clearly divided between the two sides, but the rural spaces of the border have necessitated alignments between the communities living on opposite sides of this divide, and neighbors may literally reside at opposite sides of the map's demarcation. |
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As a peripheral rural space, the border region is open to the flow of free trade and the exchange of goods. Indeed, it is unlikely that the peace process would have attracted the support of U.S. foreign policy without the pressure of global conglomerates and high finance. Capital has ensured that any marketing for foreign investment is predicated on promoting the entire "island of Ireland" rather than its constituent parts. The flow of traffic across the border territories has in fact become increasingly institutionalized with the establishment of "cross-border bodies" as part of the recent agreement. But it is not just capitalism that keeps border traffic flowing. Extreme elements of loyalism and republicanism have been forced to rethink the function of the border, ideologically and geographically. An argument put forward by Liam Kennedy in the mid-1980s, suggesting re-partition of Northern Ireland along ethnic lines to create a truly sovereign unionist Northern Ireland, has recently received support from s ome loyalist paramilitary groups. [48] The viability of repartition is open to question, yet it is a significant development from organizations with deep-rooted beliefs in the territorial sovereignty of the province. No matter how rigid the borders of a proposed re-partitioned unionist Northern Ireland would be, the fact that it is part of the critical dialogue of loyalist paramilitarism demonstrates the extent to which the border is a central aspect of any re-negotiation of the discourses used to describe the current political situation. Geographically, visually and even politically, the border is very much on the periphery of representations of Ireland. It is on the margins of the space where conflict takes place, yet ideologically it is at the heart of the dispute over territory. Haughey's series shifts the border away from the fringes of visual representations of Ireland toward a position where it can be re-negotiated through the everyday experiences of the viewer. There is always a sense in Haughey's series, however, that the conflict is never far from day-to-day life along the border. An image of spent shotgun cartridges, Shotgun Cartridges Louth/Armagh Border (1998), references landscape conventions to suggest a violent past, a nostalgic glance at territorial conflict. The lines between legitimate and illegitimate activity become blurred amid the psychological barrier that disputed territory confronts us with. The scattered red, white and blue cartridges, the colors painted on curbstones that demarcate loyalist communities throughout U lster, also indicate that issues of sovereignty and ownership of territory is all pervasive in our considerations of representations of Ireland. In yet another photograph, Surveillance Device, South Armagh (1998), the border is electronically monitored. As army checkpoints are abandoned and surveillance towers demolished, the territorial spaces of the border region are being physically transformed. This requires new ways of thinking about partition and division, re-negotiating the physical traces used to demarcate territorial boundaries. The physical borders may no longer exist but the authorities are watching and waiting for the moment when these disputed territories have to be renegotiated yet again. But as always with the border region between North and South, the traces of dispute are all around, suffused with memories that lay claim to territory. |
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In this essay I have attempted to put into context the range of social, political, and ideological issues that contemporary Irish photography engages with in the process of re-negotiating the representation of space, place and landscape. It is important to recognize that the allegorical strategies of these photographic practices mean that any reading of the images is not contingent upon these broad narratives of disputes or conflicts over territory. In the use of the everyday in their allegorical structure, they resist the absorption that Benjamin so forcefully warned against, and allow for multiple, contested and frequently unsopken readings to take place in the process of analysis. They resist any closed readings through the arbitrary objects framed by the photographic image. The flat surface of the photographic image also becomes a space to be re-negotiated, a territory where contested narratives can be articulated. What all the photographers discussed here have in common is an acknowledgement that in the context of Ireland, the past is embedded in the rhetoric of the present. The disciplinary formations of liberal historicism may wish to consign colonial rule, the famine and the conflict to their schematized periodization in history books, but historical memory always threatens to puncture these totalizing narratives of Ireland's past. As the past is drawn into collision with the present, memories of space continually transform images of territory and identity. In post-conflict Northern Ireland the peace process is just that--a process. Nothing has been resolved, no solution found or conclusion reached, and territories continue to be re-negotiated in the interim. The brief political stalemate has not enforced a "wait-and-see" strategy on contemporary Irish photography. All of the photographers discussed in this essay have ongoing projects on subjects that are yet to be resolved. For Farrell the sites need to be revisited as new information filters through to the authorities and new locations are identified. Only two of the "disappeared" have been recovered and periodically new locations are excavated and existing ones revisited. As political interest in the recovery of the bodies of the "disappeared" changes, Farrell is required to renegotiate and rethink his representations of these sites. For both Seawright and Haughey, their ongoing projects have brought them further afield: Seawright to the peripheries of European cities, Haughey to the scarred territories of Ireland's European neighbors. The disputed territories of Ireland's border region physically and ideologically impinge upon the day-to-day political rhetoric of unionists and nationalists. While Haughey has been drawn to other territories marked by conflict in Europe, the ongoing anxiety expressed about the border in Ireland requires an occasional reexamination. This is not a cursory glance back home from the European mainland; the shifting role of the border in Irish political discourse requires closer scrutiny. A recent body of work by Victor Sloan on Drumcree, the site of a protracted standoff between Northern Ireland's police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the Orange Order (who are protesting their right to march along the largely nationalist Gervaghy Road), points to the irony of returning to sites of dispute. The photo graph Road, Drumcree, Portadown (2000), represents the scars left on the road surface by security barriers erected to prevent the annual Orange Order march from following its parade route through the nationalist housing estate a few hundred yards further on. Each year a new barrier is erected, only to be dismantled, stored and reassembled the following year. New scars appear annually on the sites of protest and disputes over territory as new divisions are erected to demarcate territory. This is not merely repetition or the reenactment of tradition, rather it is the chattering ghosts of the past coming back to haunt the present. |
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JUSTIN CARVILLE teaches Historical & Theoretical Studies in Photography at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology in Dublin. NOTES (1.) Clinton's remarks were made at a press conference during the dedication of a new U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada during which he also mistook Quebec for France. (2.) The participating nationalist and unionist Parties signed the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998. The agreement paved the way for democratic elections in Northern Ireland, leading to the establishment of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly. The devolved government is made up of coalition cabinet members from Sinn Fein, the Ulster Unionist Party, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) with executive bodies made up of members from all parties elected to the assembly. The devolved government is part of an overall policy of devolution in Great Britain under Tony Blair's Labour government with devolved governments having already been established in Wales and Scotland. Despite the signing of the agreement in 1998, the Northern Ireland assembly has been something of a stop-and-go affair with a number of significant collapses during its short existence. The agreement was brokered by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell who subsequently led a review of the agreement as a result of the collaps e referred to above. (3.) On the construction of Irish stereotypes in the print media see, L. Parry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). For a counter perspective see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1996). (4.) For an assessment of reactions to Clinton's remark see Susan Garrity, "A Gaffe--or an Attempt to Kick-Start the Peace?" in Sunday Independent, October 9, 1999. (5.) A selection of such imagery can be found in Midge Podhoretz, ed., The Irish Uprising, 1916-1922 (Dublin: Macmillan, 1996); Helen Litton, The Irish Civil War: An Illustrated History (Niwot, CO: Irish American Book Company, 1998); Helen Litton Irish Rebellions 1798-1916: An Illustrated History (Niwot, CO: Irish American Book Company, 1998); and Tim Pat Coogan, ed., The Irish Civil War (London: Roberts Rinehart, 1998). (6.) "Be Prepared" was exhibited at Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, March 25-May 1, 1999. See the catalog by John Duncan, Be Prepared (Edinburgh: Stills Gallery, 1999). For a review of the exhibition see Brian McAvera, "Another Kind of World" in Source no. 19 (Summer 1999), unpaginated. (7.) Lie of the Land opened at the new Gallery of Photography at Meeting House Square in 1995. See the catalog The Lie of the Land (Dublin: The Gallery of Photography, 1995). Revealing Views: Images From Ireland was held at the Royal Festival Hall, London, March 5-April 25, 1999. Martin McCabe's catalog essay provides a good brief overview of the work exhibited. See Martin McCabe, "Present Tense: Some Notes on Images from Ireland" in Revealing Views: Images From Ireland (London: Royal Festival Hall, 1999); Victor Sloan's work can be found in Victor Sloan: Selected Works 1980-2000 (Belfast: Ormeau Baths Gallery/Orchard Gallery, 2001); Brian McAvera, Marking the North: The Work of Victor Sloan (Dublin: Open Air and York: Impressions Gallery, 1990); See also a discussion of this work in a review by Ruth Charity, "I-D Nationale" in Portfolio no. 16 (Spring 1993). pp. 12-22. |
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(8.) A publication that contains imagery from both the North and South of Ireland of this type is Red Saunders and Syd Shelton, ed., Ireland: A Week in the Life of A Nation (London: Century Hutchinson, 1986). For an interesting review of this work at the time of its publication see Luke Gibbons. "Alien Eye: Photography and Ireland" in Circa 12 (1986), pp. 10-11. (9.) As an example see Mike Abrahams and Laurie Sparham, Still War: Photographs from the North of Ireland (London: New Amsterdam, 1999) and Tom Quinn, Children of Belfast Reclaiming Their Place Among the Stones (London: Devenish, 1999). (10.) For an examination of the role of photography in reporting Northern Ireland in the British Press see John Taylor, "Northern Ireland and Terrorism" in War Photography: Realism in the British Press (London: Routledge, 1991). (11.) For an overview of conflict photography see, Norman B. Moyes and David Kennerly, ed., Battle Eye: A History of American Combat Photography (New York: Metro, 1996). (12.) "A Classic Scene of Irish Violence" in Life Vol. 69, no. 10 (September 4, 1970), pp. 48-49. (13.) Taylor, p. 12. (14.) Ibid., p. 3. (15.) Loudon Wainwright, "A People Lost in Hate: The Endless Violence in Northern Ireland Gets Worse" in Life Vol. 71, no. 8 (August 20, 1971), pp. 20-25. The following articles featured photographs of Long Kesh Internment Camp taken by a prisoner and smuggled out by a visiting relative: "Fury Grows in Ulster" and "A Prisoners View of a British Internment Camp" in Life Vol. 71, no. 29 (November 12, 1971). pp. 35-37. (16.) Clive Limpkin, The Battle of the Bogside (London: Penguin, 1972). (17.) Luke Gibbons, "Introduction: Culture, History and Irish Identity" in Transformations in Irish Culture (Dublin: Cork University Press, 1996). (18.) Ibid., pp. 8-9. (19.) Ibid., p. 7. (20.) See in particular Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism: part I" in October 12 (Spring 1980), pp. 67-86 and "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism" part II in October 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 59-80. Although less explicit in his use of allegory as a function of postmodernism, the work of Douglas Crimp is also important to consult in the context of this discussion. See Douglas Crimp, "Pictures" in October 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 75-88; "The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism" in October 15 (Winter 1980), pp. 91-101 and "Appropriating Appropriation" in Image Scavengers: Photography (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1982) These essays are reproduced along with a number of other relevant essays in Douglas Crimp, The Museum's Ruins, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). (21.) Ibid., Owens part I, p. 69. (22.) Seawright quoted in "Northern Star" The Irish Times (wednesday, May 28, 1997), p. 15. (23.) Walter Benjamin, John Osborne, trans., The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), p. 183. (24.) Bill Rolston, Politics and Painting: Murals and Conflict in Northern Ireland (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1991). |
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(25.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Versa, 1991), pp. 5-7. (26.) Paul Graham, Troubled Land (Manchester: Grey Editions, and Cornerhouse, 1987). (27.) The "Sectarian Murder" series can be found in the following publications: Paul Seawright, Inside Information (London: Photographers Gallery and Dublin: The Gallery of Photography, 1995) and Paul Seawright, Paul Seawright (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, 2000). (28.) Interview with the author, May 26, 2000. (29.) Neville Douglas, "Political Structures, Social Interaction and Identity Change in Northern Ireland" in Brian Graham, ed., In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1997). p. 152. (30.) Interview with the author, August 13, 2000. (31.) The literature on the literary and cultural revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its relationship with archaeology, science and natural history is extensive. Two useful edited volumes worth consulting are Peter J. Bowler and Nicholas White, eds., Science and Society in Ireland: The Social Context of Science and Technology in Ireland, 1800-1950 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1997) and John Wilson Foster, ed., Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (Dublin: Lilliput, 1997). (32.) For recent essays on this work see Ian Walker. "Terrain Vague" in Paul Seawright, and Mark Durden, "Paul Seawright: Malevolent Landscapes" in Portfolio 31 (June 2000). pp. 32-37. (33.) Walter Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography" reprinted in Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, trans., One Way Street and Other Writings, (London: Verso, 1985), p. 256. (34.) Seawright quoted in Aidan Dunne "Malevolence in the City" in The Irish Times (Wednesday, September 15, 1999). p. 13. (35.) "Group Seeks Information about the 14 'disappeared'" in The Irish Times (Tuesday, September 1, 1998). (36.) Fintan O'Toole, "Art Has Not Reflected Our Grief" in The Irish Times (August 1, 2000). (37.) Brian Graham, "The Imaging of Place: Representation and Identity in Contemporary Ireland" in Graham, p. 194. (38.) On public commemorative statuary in the Republic of Ireland see Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, "Commemorating the Hero in Newly Independent Ireland: Expressions of Nationhood in Bronze and Stone" in Lawrence W. McBride, ed., Images, Icons and the Nationalist Imagination (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000). (39.) Jim Cusack, "McConville Isolated as Falls Rejected British Army Role" in The Irish Times (Monday, May 31, 1999) and Jim Cusack, "A Family Tells of its Heartbroken Quest" in The Irish Times (Saturday, December 4, 1999). (40.) Suzanne Breen, "Families With No Grave to Cry at Wait for Word" in The Irish Times (Saturday, April 3, 1999). p. 7. (41.) Discussion between David Farrell and the author. (42.) Anderson, p. 26. (43.) John Urry, The Tourist's Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990). (44.) For a critical analysis of unionist and nationalist perspectives on territory in an era of increased European integration and Globalization see James Anderson. "Territorial Sovereignty and Political Identity: National Problems, Transnational Solutions?" in Graham, pp. 215-236. |
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(45.) Various stages of this body of work have been reproduced in the following catalogs: Revealing Views: Images From Ireland (London: Royal Festival Hall, Cornerhouse, 1999); BT Millennium New Media Collection (London: British Telecom, 2000); Warning Shots (Leeds: Royal Armouries Museum, 2000) and European Photography no. 68 (2000). See also a review of the exhibition "Disputed Territory," at Galerie Bodo Niemann Berlin, January 23-February 27, 1999 by Andrea Lange, "Remnants of Conflict," in Source 19 (Summer 1999). (46.) Benjamin, p. 175. (47.) Owens, Part I, pp. 72-75. (48.) Brian Graham, "The Imagining of Place: Representation and Identity in Contemporary Ireland" in Graham, pp. 206-207. |
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