The Spaces In Between

David Brett

Essay Commisioned by Belfast Exposed

Two propositions; a city is not a place, but a process. And; though we can see this process (this city), we very rarely look at it.

A process because the city (any city) is always coming-into-being, transforming and metamorphosing before our very eyes. This is true even while it crumbles like a ruin of the past, as it approaches not-being. This perception, which everyone who looks at the long or short term histories of a city can hardly avoid, tempts us into easy organic analogies. We tend to look at our largest creations as if they were growths - like colonies of lichen or like coral reefs - which spread independent of human agency. But this is not the case. Everything in a city is the result of human acts, wills and intentions. These acts, however, are so diffused, and so multiple are the causes, that we can feel unable to identify just how and where wills and intentions have operated. It just seems to happen around us. This is particularly the case in the close-grained texture of inner-city areas where different time-layers lie over one another as closely compacted as geological strata. New and old lie jumbled up together.

And we cannot see this agency directly, because we so rarely look at it or for it. As we go about daily life, we scarcely look at anything, least of all the city we move through. Of course we can see it, we can note it, we can summarise it into a sort of visual shorthand, and we can recognise it. But how often do we actually look? James Gibson, in his studies of what he calls 'the ecology of vision', makes a distinction between the kind of optical experience we have when we fix our eye upon our surroundings, and that which we have as we amble through them. The first he calls 'field vision'; to set against 'world vision'. The two mutually exclude one another. We cannot both look at and see at the same time.

Except when we take a photograph. To make a picture of something we have to dwell upon it through looking. This is a purposive act that produces a form of knowledge. This is true even when we seem to be working without very much conscious intention; the act of pointing a camera, like pointing your finger, is ostentive. This, it says, is to be looked at, not just seen. It stipulates - be aware.

Nearly all John Duncan's photographs were taken in that post-industrial Belfast that surrounds the city centre, mostly within the belt of the motorways. This is always, in every city, a difficult area, because its economic function has been lost or lobotomised by large scale clearances and road-schemes. Streets end for no good reason and go nowhere in particular. Properties become run-down. Nature takes over in unexpected quarters and bursts out of enclosures.

I do not think John Duncan has a particular political intention when he makes these pictures; but he does look carefully (which is also carried forward in selecting the images he wishes to show to us). And what he has looked at is that process of becoming - the steady appearance of a 'new Belfast' amidst the old. This is partly a matter of recording new kinds of sights we could not have looked at a few years ago; a huge stack of rooms (actually, part of the American Day's Inn motel chain) is the backdrop to a much more familiar kind of stack - palettes heaped for a July bonfire. In the next image, a fire has burnt away and in the background there is a familiar vision of old, renovated and new buildings (in fact the apparently new block is a re-facaded structure which had previously been amongst the most stunningly ugly structures in town, now modestly 'improved'). New trees are being/have just been planted in twelve of the photographs; in others, old vegetation is bursting through new fences or erupting in unruly profusion out of a corner of desolation. And when we seem to have a wholly new scene before us (the view from South Studios on Tate's Avenue, looking over the Village) we first of all spot a Union Jack poking over the wall and then, in a double-take, we realise that what we had lazily seen as a high block of flats is, when looked at, the topmost tier of a huge 12th bonfire, complete with UVF banner. Old Belfast is still with us, unregenerate.

And then there are the people... or lack of them. One man lays out turf as if it were a red carpet. The only woman is trying, it seems anxiously, to key in her PIN number at a huge security gate. Another building appears to be erecting itself, like vegetation. Hardly anyone is present; and they are all looked at in their relation to the new building/paving/planting. In this the photographs partly resemble and partly parody the conventions of architectural drawings in which we see scarcely anyone unless they are there to illustrate the function of the drawings. The architects' methods are very hard for the uninitiated to grasp; they are a special visual language whose object is to provide instructions, not empathy. It is no wonder that most of us find them intimidating; they are designed to exclude us. We become passive, the ones to whom something is about to be done, and it appears that the exclusion is not fortuitous. Decisions are being made in which we have no part.

This really is the case. In the absence of extensive and intensive consultative procedures, the market economy will always produce buildings in which few people have any real say. In Belfast, the sense of not being consulted is of a piece with the general problem of legitimacy, that goes to the very root of the state, and for years of direct rule there was no planning authority at the middle level. As a result, there are buildings in this city that would have been permitted nowhere else in the U.K. (Query: I ask myself what is the status of the present planning authority, has it reverted to direct rule along with everything else?).

There are human consequences to this. Considered from the standpoint of the inhabitants of The Village, the new South Studios is as alien as a cruise liner docked in a third world port. It is no wonder that it looks, in these photographs, as if it is being besieged by an army of landless peasants, with their banners. And how many fences are there - I think I have spotted seventeen metal railings or barriers in the photographs John Duncan has assembled. It is worth while looking, too, at the covert texts hidden in these pictures. 'YOU ARE NOW ENTERING...', 'HUGE', 'HOURLY TARIF', 'democracy denied'. This is the language of an insect in a box, full of clicks and scratchings.

John Duncan is also presenting us with a distinctive palette - the pale orange and buff of new brickwork; intense or saturated hues are rare - we find full colour only on the cover of a truck. These mute colours, like these new streets and courtyards, are unused. They have not yet entered into time. Belfast, as a whole, is a colourful city; its brick is rich and mellow and, when the light gets low in the south west, the whole city can glow. But these colours we suspect, will never glow. This palette is at one with the cool, off-hand humour of the view-finding. It says - I find no passion here. (Query: do modern bricks mellow? From this window I look out at a nineteenth century brick wall in which every brick is now a different colour.)

He is also presenting us with a light, and therefore with a climate. An almost shadowless light that evens out the contours of his buildings. It is a stationary climate he has chosen; in a city where the light changes minute by minute and in which we can pass three seasons in a day. There are no puddles, in a city notorious for its flooding streets and drowned pavements. As a result, it hardly seems to be Belfast; except that we know it is.

I am writing this essay with beside me a document entitled 'Belfast City Centre: Public Realm Strategy'; it is a report created for the Belfast Regeneration Office by local consultants. In it we learn that the public realm is 'the shop window' of the City, that should 'convey a strong and positive message to its citizens.' The report is full of generous and practical ideas for improvement. Well, I have to tell the authors that, on the evidence of these photographs, current new developments are seen as alien intrusions that lack the convivial mess of real life. It appears that when real experience intrudes into the developer's world, it takes on malignant forms - rubbish and social threat or, and this may be worse, an absence of human commitment.

But of course, the commitment is there, in the steadfast looking. These photographs demonstrate the paying of attention; this, they insist, is something to be looked at. It does not just pass before your eye. You have an ecological relation to these sights. There is a further entailment to this perception, that we are, whether we care or not, in an ethical relation to what is being shown in these photographs, an ethical relation which the images embody. This is not to be identified with the photographer's relationship with his subject, (which is evidently a little distant, humourous, touched with irony and wit), but with the understanding, recognition and distancing that his photographs release in us.