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The Politics of Place, Space and Landscape in Irish
Photography
Extract from Re-Negotiated Territory - analysis of Irish
photography by
Justin Carville, Afterimage, July 2001.
During the first collapse of Northern Ireland's devolved
Legislative Assembly, former United States President Bill Clinton
offered a comment on the opposing nationalist and unionist parties
involved that prompted a short-lived but derisive commentary from
those journalists who had followed Clinton's role in the Northern
Ireland peace process. [1] In obvious frustration at the inability
of the Ulster Unionist Party led by David Trimble, and Sinn Fein,
led by Gerry Adams, to reach a compromise that would see the full
implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Clinton
remarked, "they're like a couple of drunks walking out of the bar
for the last time, when they get to the swinging door they turn
around and go back in and say, 'I just can't quite get there,'"
[2] The subsequent media attention to these remarks led to a
succession of claims by journalists that Clinton had resorted to
racial stereotypes of drunken Irish-ness to express his
displeasure at the ongoing political stalemate taking place across
the e Atlantic. Clinton's peculiar brand of "paddy-whackery" has a
well documented history and offered nothing new to the lexicon of
stereotypes that already exist to describe Ireland and its
citizens; the irony is however that these stereotypes have
historically originated from the print media itself. [3]
Despite efforts by some sections of the international media to
make journalistic capital out of Clinton's remarks, the reaction
of the Irish media was much more subdued. [4] Indeed the reaction
of most of the Irish public was one of perplexed amusement at the
fuss that was being made over such a banal comment. Unfortunate as
Clinton's choice of metaphor was it was no worse than what had
come before. What had been interpreted as racial stereotyping by
certain sections of the international and U.S. media had been
recognized as an inability to articulate an ongoing complex
political situation by the Irish public. The metaphors, euphemisms
and discourse used by foreign affairs spokespeople and the western
media have frequently fallen back on stereotypical images of
Ireland in their frustration to articulate the complexities of
Irish historical and political life. What Clinton and other
foreign observers of what has been labelled "The Troubles" have
failed to grasp is that the discourses used to describe the shift
s in Irish politics need to be re-negotiated in an ongoing basis.
In relation to the current political situation in Northern Ireland
(even though politicians from both sides of the unionist and
nationalist divide speak of an everlasting peace and a complete
cessation of sectarian violence) what is taking place is a peace
process, a process that has and will continue to be reviewed and
negotiated for some time to come.
It is, however, not just the political situation in Northern
Ireland that faces these continual re-negotiations. A broad
spectrum of political, historical and cultural practices are
continually re-negotiated as a result of massive upheavals brought
about by unprecedented economic prosperity and immigration
throughout the whole of Ireland. Images of economic prosperity and
peace, however, remain alien to those who have viewed Ireland
through the two portholes of urban conflict and rural idyll. Such
representations after all have been the dominant images of Ireland
since the rise of colonial tourism and the uprisings of 1798 and
1916. [5] These representations have for the most part been
produced [and distributed by outside media agencies, either
through journalistic representations of Northern Ireland or high
production value publications of the Irish landscape aimed at the
diaspora. With these dominant representations emanating from
outside cultural representative practices, Irish artists and
photographers have been left with no alternative but to
re-articulate representations of Ireland in terms of these outside
media influences. That is to say, artists and photographers have
not discarded the remnants of images of Ireland's past in their
attempts to represent the changes taking place in the Irish
political and social landscape. Rather, these representations form
the basis of a re-negotiated territory that sets out to counter
the dominant representations of Ireland that exist in western
culture.
I
use the phrase re-negotiated territory here, to put in place a
frame of reference to address the practices of a number of Irish
photographers who have approached the representation of space and
place through a direct engagement with the changing political and
philosophical discourses associated with Irish identity. This
re-negotiation can be identified as threefold. Firstly, it is a
re-negotiation of the territory of photographic practice that sets
out to critically engage with the political economy of
photographic representations of Ireland. This does not just entail
a re-negotiation of the politics of representation; it also sets
out to open up the way in which the viewer encounters these
representations. Secondly, it is a re-negotiation of the way space
is represented in the photographic image. Space in Ireland is
shaped by particular ideologies that are fixed in the prevailing
discourses of unionism and nationalism and the photographers
discussed in this essay are aware of the role of the photographic
image in constructing space in relation to identity. Their
re-negotiation of space is not to "reshape" it but rather to open
it up to multiple and contesting narratives. Thirdly, their work
sets out to re-negotiate the dominant discourses used to describe
the representation of Irish history, politics and culture. That is
to say, by opening up the representation of space and place, their
work allows for alternative, contested and frequently unspoken
narratives of identity to be expressed through their work.
…A recent body of work by Victor Sloan on
Drumcree, the site of a protracted standoff between
Northern Ireland's police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary,
and the Orange Order (who are protesting their right to march
along the largely nationalist Gervaghy Road), points to the irony
of returning to sites of dispute. The photograph
Road, Drumcree, Portadown (2000), represents the
scars left on the road surface by security barriers erected to
prevent the annual Orange Order march from following its parade
route through the nationalist housing estate a few hundred yards
further on. Each year a new barrier is erected, only to be
dismantled, stored and reassembled the following year. New scars
appear annually on the sites of protest and disputes over
territory as new divisions are erected to demarcate territory.
This is not merely repetition or the re-enactment of tradition,
rather it is the chattering ghosts of the past coming back to
haunt the present.
NOTES
(1.)
Clinton's remarks were made at a press conference during the
dedication of a new U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada during which he
also mistook Quebec for France.
(2.) The participating nationalist and unionist Parties signed the
Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998. The agreement paved the
way for democratic elections in Northern Ireland, leading to the
establishment of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly. The
devolved government is made up of coalition cabinet members from
Sinn Fein, the Ulster Unionist Party, and the Social Democratic
and Labour Party (SDLP) with executive bodies made up of members
from all parties elected to the assembly. The devolved government
is part of an overall policy of devolution in Great Britain under
Tony Blair's Labour government with devolved governments having
already been established in Wales and Scotland. Despite the
signing of the agreement in 1998, the Northern Ireland assembly
has been something of a stop-and-go affair with a number of
significant collapses during its short existence. The agreement
was brokered by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell who
subsequently led a review of the agreement as a result of the
collapse referred to above.
(3.) On the construction of Irish stereotypes in the print media
see, L. Parry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian
Caricature (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1997). For a counter perspective see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish
Became White (London: Routledge, 1996).
(4.) For an assessment of reactions to Clinton's remark see Susan
Garrity, "A Gaffe--or an Attempt to Kick-Start the Peace?" in
Sunday Independent, October 9, 1999.
(5.) A selection of such imagery can be found in Midge Podhoretz,
ed., The Irish Uprising, 1916-1922 (Dublin: Macmillan, 1996);
Helen Litton, The Irish Civil War: An Illustrated History (Niwot,
CO: Irish American Book Company, 1998); Helen Litton Irish
Rebellions 1798-1916: An Illustrated History (Niwot, CO: Irish
American Book Company, 1998); and Tim Pat Coogan, ed., The Irish
Civil War (London: Roberts Rinehart, 1998).
JUSTIN CARVILLE
teaches Historical & Theoretical Studies in Photography at Dun
Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology in Dublin.
afterimage@vsw.org
www.vsw.org/afterimage
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