This was the first lecture of 2015 by Dr Alison Rowley.
In the first year we covered key concepts in communication. This year we will be concentrating and looking at key works by contemporary artists and looking to understand the compositions made by the artists, they contexts, their reasons for the composition, political and cultural background in which the images were created, and so on.
In this lecture we will look at a series of six photographs by Willie Doherty, created in Northern Ireland, in Belfast were an exhibition was held in 2008.
Our encounter with art, very much depends on where we stand in context of the current culture that we live in. In October 2008 when Willie Doherty took these photographs originally, there was, concurrently, a vital summit meeting going on between the political parties of Belfast and their political masters on the mainland of the United Kingdom. This summit meeting was generally aimed at the future of Belfast with regards to its need, in fact desperate need, for a re-generation.
The first photograph to be analysed is called McKibbin's Court, Belfast. This image is of a corridor style backstreet somewhere in the city. It is like any other backstreet in any other northern city of England. It comprises of shuttered loading bays, graffiti on the walls, general dilapidation, a dusty road surface, and generally un-cared for appearance. But it also has a spire of a Victorian steeple from a church, behind a derelict warehouse. The composition has been chosen to include the church spire in the background seemingly touching (in the brief of this sense), the top of a lamp-post. This device of the church spire in the distance touching foreground lamppost in the middle distance completely compresses the image. If one was to compare this with another piece of work from the famous photographer William A McCutcheon who photographed much of the 1960s through a survey of Belfast, (which documents the degradation of the fabric of the city).
In 1988 William Doherty continued photographs with the second image in question today, which is called Donegal Lane. This is an image dominated with a background view of what appears to be a recently constructed post-modernist facade of a large building. This represents a feature of the city's recent reconstruction in 1988, but it is juxtaposed with a scene of another street facade in the foreground of more typical dilapidation and degradation, with boarded-up shopfronts and the feel that the community spirit of that area seems to have been ripped out.
In "Strategy; Sever / Isolate", 1989, which shows the separation of the Catholic Falls Road area and the Protestant city centre. This is essentially a photograph of a wide bypass road cut deeply across those two areas.
The third image allows us to consider William Doherty's "West link" 1988, (but only printed for this exhibition of 2008) which is an exhibition piece displayed with the footbridge over the West-link bypass, which interestingly is juxtaposed with this piece "strategy; sever isolate", which was actually taken in 2008, which shows the time when there was a vilification of a much different minority within cultural Belfast. This is evidenced by the gay and lesbian graffiti which can be seen in the image painted on the ground in the foreground.
In all these images, they show "no clear means of exit" of any of Belfast's alleys and walkways. This is a kind of device that has been used by other artists and photographers such as Ade Russa (American) and Thomas Struth (1978), - a German artist who photographed much of the streets of New York. Thomas Struth's work includes use of Düsselstrasser, taken in Düsseldorf, in 1979. In this image Struth puts himself in the centre of the street, in order to aesthetically "reprocess" between the pre-and post-war (in other words War conflict), and is the same strategy that William Doherty incorporates in his own "temporal disjuncture" of his photographs showing 1988 versus the architecture of 2008 in his photos. Interestingly the technique to create these photographs are both through the wet analogue black-and-white photographic technology (in other words, chemical photography) which was available in 1988, taken on FP 4 film, and then in 2008 taken on FP five film. By using this older technology with the gelatine silver print basis, but then also by using digital techniques to print the images, creates a new temporal disjuncture, and creates a new strange feeling of displacement for the viewer.
Next, consider Don McCullin's reportage photography of the Bogside in Derry Belfast in 1971. This was taken on bloody Sunday (and then again after the Saville enquiry of 2007). Consider this with another photograph taken by Don McCullin's, of the Bogside Derry in 1971, which shows the breakdown of civil order. It is very grainy and shows photojournalism at its best, nevertheless is assembled by sights of destruction.
It should be pointed out however that Willie Doherty "hates" these older photographs, because arguably, the photojournalists at the time were only there in 'those spaces' for a few days at most, and the photographs that they took did not show reality. However these photographs (of the troubles during the 70s), must have influenced Willie Doherty. Don McCullin's photographs seem to almost haunt Willie Doherty. (This haunting goes on, so much so, that Willie Doherty created a video installation in 2007 entitled "ghost story").
This idea of a haunted feeling been present in Belfast's streets re-occurs in Willie Doherty's 2008 exhibition of the series of six photographs at this lecture is specifically concerned with.
Bizarrely, Belfast now has six quarters... 6/4? Two new quarters are the Cathedral Quarter and the Titanic Quarter, which is the regeneration area of the dock sides. I agree with Dr Rowley, that this is a particularly stupid title for a regeneration area of Belfast, as the decline of it is almost inevitable, just like the Titanic itself which by the way was originally built in this dock.
The next image in Willie Doherty's series is that of Franklin Street Place, Belfast, which shows again, the corridor style entrance to the galleries which again symbolises 'temporal displacement'. The "then and now" are of reformulation of the images, as a strategy to cause the viewer to relook at the true history of the area. This is completely intentional.
The overall key to these six photographic plates taken in this series, is the very subtle detail that is in each of the photographs. You have to study them very carefully indeed to see all the artist's intentions, but there is a richness of work that shows how careful he has been in composing these views.
The next lecture in this series will investigate another photographer Arthur Rothberg, who will be the subject next week will stop
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