Retrospective Gazing: Photography, Belfast and the Archive

Mark Durden

Commisioned by Belfast Exposed

The archival mode defines a core element of photography's history and indicates a detached, systematic, straightforward and functional way of picturing the world. If initially an archival use of photography was outside artistic and pictorial uses of the medium, it has now very much come to define an aesthetic look and style for photography as contemporary art. In its tendency to an understated documentary accumulation and registration of evidence, current photography in Northern Ireland has been defined by a relation to the archival as a mode of photographic practice. Only here it is always much more than an aesthetic look. Indeed, when that look is most dominant, as in Donovan Wylie's systematic and serial pictures of the Maze prison, the aesthetic order and beauty found in this now empty structure can never be detached from the oppressive architecture's central place in the history of the Troubles.

Claudio Hils's book Archive-Belfast documents symbolically charged remnants of Belfast's history, objects and things kept in storage, cluttering and overspilling rooms. In his photograph in the People's Museum, Fernhill House, he picks out the detail of neglect and potential disorder in the archive, as one of the wooden spindles supporting a shelf of bound copies of the Irish Times breaks under their weight. Such an image typifies Hils's metaphoric use of photography and characterises his critical engagement with archives as repositories of knowledge, all in connection with a city whose history has been marked by violent conflict. Indeed, one picture in the book even shows crates for a Troubled Images touring exhibition, in storage in a basement library.

Claudio Hils Hils pictures Belfast through mediation - primarily through the collections of objects and things in official and semi-official institutions: hospitals, prisons, libraries, museums, police stations. His photographs ask questions about history in relation to the city of Belfast when its past is being consigned to the archives, archives whose disorder and disarray raises questions about the adequacy and effectivity of such systems of knowledge management.

The book begins with the blank photo-studio backdrop used by the police service, a familiar system, which speaks about the mechanics of power, and of course photography's complicity in this. It closes with a portrait of a family in Belfast that looks very old, but is in fact a somewhat phony image, since the golden hue and aura is less about time but the result of poor digital scanning. The human dimension is mostly erased in this book. The family portrait at the end offers only a fleeting and ghostly reminder of the other side to the soulless functionality of bureaucracy and power.

Hils's photographs of X-rays showing bullet wounds are clear testimony to violence, but only offer an abstract and dehumanised view of human suffering and pain. The place of the subjective and emotive in relation to the mechanics of power is nevertheless articulated very powerfully through one extraordinary image: his photograph of CCTV surveillance monitors reflected in a memorial poster to dead RUC officers.

Its implication is that the operations of state control and power in the city can still be haunted and distorted by memories of the violent past. Such a doubled image also highlights that there is no clear view, undermines the panoptic vision connected with police surveillance and further counters the clarity of the archival mode itself.

Hils's mode of looking back characterises a number of recent projects which have emerged from post-Ceasefire Belfast: a deliberate retrospective gazing which signals a reflection on pastness at a moment of dramatic change, when old fixities are seen to become less certain. Such work also sets up a counterpoint to media images which marked the Troubles as a spectacle of violence, which as Jean Fisher has argued helped maintain a colonial construction of the Irish as a barbaric and disordered other - the media coverage facilitating the English's continued projection of its own 'disorder' onto the 'native'.

It is appropriate that Hils questions the archive. His pictures undo the coherence and logic expected from archives and show us official culture's attempt to consign the Troubles to history. What it does in terms of the archive is analogous to what artists were earlier doing in relation to the landscape genre - artists like Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright , who both worked against the colonizing and imperial vista, through the crime scene look of scruffy indeterminate urban peripheral spaces, "wastelands of undecidability."

John Duncan's photography of Belfast, in some senses, returns us to the tradition and conventions of the landscape genre. But his approach is distinctive from Doherty's and Seawright's. His Trees from Germany, closely mirrors the archival mode: dispassionate, detached observances of the recent transformations in the cityscape. The trees of the title are being planted as part of Belfast's rapid urban redevelopment. His photographs tend to bring out the artifice to the new build Belfast, with many structures having the appearance of theatrical sets. In an earlier series, Boom Town, he frontally framed hoardings that pictured new development projects in the city, utopian architectural visions that were often set against their empty and unpromising urban settings. The emerging commercial Belfast provides another layer to the city, positioned in relation to the more brutish architecture of the past. This manicured and fake late-Capitalist Belfast brings with it new fortified structures, gated communities like Bell Towers, are now added to the older sectarian divisions. Many images show the persistence of the old, unregenerate Belfast - the towers of palettes for July bonfires, the flags and murals set against the new apartment blocks and hotels. The isolation of unkempt and undeveloped patches of land in the city, Berry Street, Smithfield, for example, seem especially symbolically charged, islands of resistance to the city's colonialism by commerce.

If Duncan's pictures of the redevelopment and economic expansion of new Belfast show how it is unable to erase the past, Eoghan McTigue's All Over Again, turns to another aspect of the city's radical transformation under the Peace Process. All Over Again by Eoghan McTigue He makes straight frontal photographs of the painted over murals from Loyalist and Republican areas of Belfast. He deliberately plays with the connotations of this white over-painting; his shrouded signs appearing like modernist abstractions, evoking a social utopianism far removed from the divisive signs that they cover. McTigue's erased political slogans speak of a popular will to end sectarian conflict. But, as he acknowledges, there are still often enough residual details in the painted over murals to indicate whether they are Republican or Loyalist. The most intractable messages might be loosening their hold, but transformation and change is never that simple or straightforward.

Donovan Wylie evokes Modernist form through pushing the archival mode of photography to a point of extremity. His photography mimics the oppressive structure and systematic nature of the Maze prison itself. Wylie documents the maximum-security prison when it is no longer in use. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement had paved the way for the release of all the Republican and Loyalist prisoners and by September 2000 the maze was empty. Wylie has spoken of the rationale for his recourse to serial, repetitive pictures: "I wanted to create long sequences of pictures that would replicate my experience of walking through what felt like endless spaces that only fractionally changed, that in the end left you feeling completely disoriented." Many pictures photograph the voids between the perimeter walls, central, perspective views that, while they might evoke a mastering and empowering gaze, speak ultimately of disempowerment and blocked vision. His sequences return us again and again to the incarcerating prison walls. One could read Wylie's pictures as signalling distance and disengagement from the strong political and historical meaning of the Maze. He is a Magnum photographer and yet he makes pictures that distinctly lack the drama and emotionalism ordinarily associated with documentary and reportage. The blanket and dirty protests, the hunger strikes, all the violent and tragic events connected with this infamous prison, remain outside and beyond the scope of his photography. But Wylie shifts us to something very specific - the psychological and physical control and discipline integral to the maximum security prison. In this respect his work is very distinct from the minimalist serial formalism in photography, typified by the art of the Bechers. Wylie's work can be seen to represent the archival mode of picturing at its purest, but here the disavowal of subjectivity and expression is linked to the disorientation and de-humanizing effect of the prison itself, the oppressive functioning of a colonial and imperial power.

Mark Durden is Reader in History and Theory of Photography and Programme Leader in Photography at the University of Derby. He is also an artist and writer. Together with David Campbell he forms the artists' group Common Culture. His writings on photography and contemporary art have been published in a number of journals, including Parachute, Source, Portfolio, Afterimage and Contemporary.