Fire Places – John Duncan in Belfast
They remain, though, occasions of heightened visual drama. News photographs from this year’s festivities (or demonstrations, if you prefer) pictured local lads scaling mountains of pallets, night-time revellers draped in flags, and fire-fighters hosing down nearby houses. And, of course, flames.
John Duncan’s photographs of bonfires are in a different register – distanced, studied, deserted…and very much untorched. “I did take photographs of the stacks on fire” he admits, “but in the end I decided against including those in the final edit.” A curious decision, perhaps, for someone who trained as a photojournalist.
Seeking to explain his own carefully undramatic photography,
“I think in contrast to the new image the city is trying to project they do seem very out of place.
“They present a very dramatic contrast between the development of the new
“I’m not shying away from the fact that these things are connected to very specific political situations, but I do think that once you start to exhibit the work, or distribute it in a book, it becomes difficult to control people’s information about the politics of Northern Ireland. In this book the essay provides quite a solid framework in terms of the specifics of the politics. Hopefully the images themselves can draw you in and if you are interested in following through some of those specifics it’s possible to do that as well”
“There’s been a particular strand of art photography that’s been made in Northern Ireland”, he explains, “by people like Paul Graham and Paul Seawright for example – that has set out to make images that are doing something different to mainstream photography from the area. It’s part of a broader trend: the space for photojournalism in the established media has shrunk, and that kind of photography has tended to find its way more into the gallery and less into the pages of, say, the Guardian Weekend magazine.
“There are different possibilities when you come to work in a gallery – both in terms of the scale and number of the images that you can work with, and also the amount of time that you have to work on a project. I’m interested in immersing the viewer in the work, and in how it sits in a gallery – I hope that it works as an installation.”
Ultimately, it seems that some of the decisions and choices that have shaped his work have been determined not just by structural changes to the field of photojournalism in recent years, but also by first hand experience of the demands of working for the press.
“I was somebody who attended
But I think I was fairly idealistic, and fairly naïve about the whole thing. Over the years I’ve thought quite a bit about why I did not become a photojournalist and I think one of the things that affected me was spending some time in the company of the press covering events in
© Guy lane, 2008.
Bonfires – at Wolverhampton Art Gallery 26 July 08 – 18 Oct 08