Éire-Ireland

INSIDERS AND FRONTIERS: PAUL SEAWRIGHT’S IMAGES OF “THE TROUBLES” ALVIN JACKSON PAUL SEAWRIGHT AND HIS WORK Rooted in the scarred borderlands of North and West Belfast, Paul Seawright remains fascinated with the barricaded frontiers, both physical and mental, that have characterized his native city.1 Since the mid-1980s, Seawright has created several series of photographs that both document and explore the political environment within which he grew up. In these, as in much of his work, he displays an eye for paradox and absurdity. His approach seems non-judgmental, but rather quizzical, perhaps sardonic; many of the photographs in the Orange Order and Police Force series are taken from a low angle, suggesting the viewpoint of an inquisitive child. But it would be wrong to confuse curiosity with naïveté or ingenuousness: the artful conjunction of images in Seawright’s photographs, his careful angling of shots, his recurrent social and philosophical concerns all indicate work of considerable sophistication and integrity. The first of these series, Sectarian Murder (1988), portrays a number of murder sites but seeks to convey the emotional charge of Northern Irish violence using a very different approach from that favored—indeed exhausted —by earlier documentary photographers. Seawright’s images eschew the blatant portrayals of violence and confrontation provided in PAUL SEAWRIGHT’S IMAGES OF “THE TROUBLES” 255 1 Born in 1965, Paul Seawright was educated at the University of Ulster and West Surrey College of Art and Design; for some years he taught at the University of Ulster, moving in 1994 to a lectureship in the Newport School of Art, a constituent college of the University of Wales. Seawright has exhibited widely, has held a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and is winning an international reputation as a documentary photographer. A major collection of his work, Inside Information, was published by the Photographer’s Gallery, London, in 1995. The commentary herein focuses on this volume and on more recent and unpublished images from Seawright’s camera. more conventional work; instead he focuses on the ordinariness or indeed the beauty of many of the sites of carnage, communicating by allusion or by paradox. In this series, as elsewhere in Seawright’s work, the viewpoint is highly suggestive; here the many ground-level shots serve to convey the viewpoint of the dying victims, with apparently insignificant items—rubble , stones, litter—assuming an eerie prominence. Occasionally the imagery is direct and unmistakable. In Tuesday 8 October 1974, a scene of a building site, a crumpled plastic sheet, and an overturned bucket together form a corpse-like shape in the right foreground ; the viewpoint is just below ground level, looking out from a drainage trench or foundations and directly evoking the grave. Friday 22 September 1972 depicts wasteground and, in the distance, a suburban housing development; a discarded shoe in the center foreground refers to the menace of the place, inviting comparisons with one of the most poignant images of death—an empty shoe—from the video footage of the rediscovered Titanic. A toppled concrete pillar in Monday 30 December 1974, photographed at ground level, serves as an equally crisp evocation of death. But there are other approaches. In the photograph entitled Tuesday 3rd April 1973, a seascape is framed by the metal scaffolding of a child’s slide (figure 1). As with the ground-level shots, the history of the site is subtly evoked through the viewpoint, which is located at the top of the slide and suggests an emotional crescendo. Saturday 9th June 1973 offers another children ’s playground and another murder scene, depicting a father pushing his son on a swing. But Seawright uses the bleak, pealing, and rusting frame of a roundabout that dominates the foreground of the photograph to amplify some of the uglier resonances of the location. The handrails on the roundabout, photographed from a low level and with scarlet paint predominating , suggest a surreal rendering of the Holy Cross. This interest in the eloquence of metalwork is fully evident in the later Cage images and in Gate. Similar modes of approach are evident in Orange Order (1991) and Police Force (1995). In the former series an image of a...