Images of post-conflict Belfast

Abstract

In Catharsis, I explore to what degree the language of the snapshot contributes to or obscures our understanding of time and place, since the idea of knowing someone through their personal images is open to question. Bringing together three elements; family album snaps made in Belfast by my father in the 50’s and 60’s, new documentary images of post-conflict sites which are presently tourist sites made by me and GPS coordinates which serve as a reminder of Belfast's military history, I situate each image in relation to an unspoken memory. The stark contrast in scale and genre, between the personal snapshots and the conceptually driven documentary images, helps shape an understanding of the gap between the personal and the conceptual, mapping out ritual, marking territory and retracing history. While the family album references a site of personal and social identity, the documentary genre can only point to but never reveal the subtle and often absent history embedded within it. By engaging the viewer in a dialogue between the familial and the documentary against the fixity of the GPS coordinates, I open up a space to examine the multiple ways photography informs identity, personal memory and social history.