Collage pieces assembled from images taken in and around Dublin, Ireland
Sometimes I’m no longer just taking pictures but part of the landscape or subject under observation. I’m observing a world and recording and observing myself and my response, I’m present but feel an invisible observer. I have always felt that I have had sensitivity to the past; recognition that my presence anywhere is part of a continuing process and that I must inevitably fall into that past. Nothing brings the past closer to me more than gathering pictures. The act of looking, forces it on me. Recently, I’ve come to feel keenly the loss of my ‘ear’ for music. It is as if a dimension has been lost and my appreciation is less than it was before. Taking photos I feel that I've gained a dimension; it is some compensation. I say ‘some’ as my response to music in the past has been deeper, more profound; sometimes nearing ecstatic. I have had some wonderful moments with my camera but no emotional response to compare. Nonetheless I am delighted with my photographic ‘sensations’; the hair has been known to stiffen on the back of my neck. It is when I take pictures in an urban setting that I have the strongest sensation that I’m influenced by the ebb and flow of the past. The history of any city is the accumulated aspirations, decisions, actions and conflicts of its people. For me the places and buildings of a city resonate with history, enriching my photographic experience. I’m not referring to the great events of history that fill books and guides, but the mundane details that appear to be of very little significance. The pile up unnoticed but are there to tell a story. This is most apparent in the suburbs of a city or a town where the noise and activity are reduced to a background hum and buildings and settings are of human scale. For the desired affect these places must be empty of people but not of the possibility that people are nearby. I’m looking for an atmosphere acutely affected by the knowledge that people have been recently present and imminent. So I think I exist in a space between those moments, observing the absence, recording it. Nowhere have these experiences been as strong as when I have explored the lanes and passages running behind the terraces of Dublin’s inner suburbs. Edwardian and Victorian housing for the middle class include long gardens with outbuildings and mews with access via lanes to the rear. Some buildings have been converted to garages while others are in a state of gentle decay. With a perceived rise in crime, and the absence of people during the day, gateways and garden walls are often fortified or bricked up, while some have become inaccessible by generations of ivy growth. All these modifications and abandon have their histories. What brings someone to choose the colour to paint a gate? A look at the peeling paint will show a whole rainbow of colours in the past. Why is each colour often a huge break with the previous one? Perhaps it is much about announcing a change in ownership. Why is one gate fortified with bars, bricked up and decorated with sprays of barbed wire and broken glass while its neighbour, neglected, is left to picturesque decay? Has some crime or fear of crime caused one set of events in one place and not in other? What happens in the night in these places, dark, empty and avoided? The signs are there; graffiti, attempted arson, abandoned condoms, discarded underwear and syringes. Fly tipping. What goes on behind the gates, fences and walls? The front of a house might look respectable but the garden hidden behind the façade might be a riotous jungle of vegetation that mellows the outlines of abandoned furniture, vehicles, rubble and black plastic bags. Black plastic bags. Why so many? And what’s in them? Some houses appear to be unoccupied from the front but trails winding through the garden wasteland tell otherwise. What is the history here? Tearing away the ivy and pushing through a blocked gateway could one be sure to find the same reality, the same time as that of the outside world?
31 Ilkley Road
Riddlesden
Keighley
BD20 5PN
Bradford
West Yorkshire
United Kingdom
Europe
