Fire Places – John Duncan in Belfast

Northern Ireland’s traditional Eleventh night bonfires  – built in loyalist areas to herald the Orange Order parades of the twelfth – have long played a contentious role in Protestant culture. But their function is gradually changing: no longer associated with the burning of papal effigies and the brandishing of automatic weapons, the only controversy they provoke nowadays concerns the amount of pollutants released by Belfast’s thousands of burning tyres.

Boucher Road, Belfast, 2004 © John Duncan

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, Duncan suggests, “my longer term interests have been to do with the landscape, the cityscape of Belfast and how it has been changing. In my background there is more of a landscape tradition than a photojournalistic approach. I was most interested in the bonfires as temporary interventions in that landscape.”

“I think in contrast to the new image the city is trying to project they do seem very out of place. Belfast – like a lot of other cities – is very conscious of its image. And if you look through the tourist imagery, or the imagery associated with industrial development work, you’re not going to see pictures of bonfires like that.”

“They present a very dramatic contrast between the development of the new Belfast, and a very different tradition. They first started to make these things in 1693 and they continue to be built so, in a way, they belong to a longer tradition than any other buildings currently standing in the city.

Glencairn Way, Belfast, 2004 © John Duncan

“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”

Duncan’s use of the post-ceasefire cityscapes of Belfast as a means of, however obliquely, addressing contemporary history is indicative of his estrangement from the techniques of reportage in which he was schooled. And his descriptions of the bonfires as “temporary interventions” and “idiosyncratic architectural structures” (reminiscent of the Bechers’ “Anonyme Skulpturen”) disclose the centrality to his work of concepts and procedures perhaps more readily associated with  forms of artistic practice.

Keswick Street, Belfast, 2004 © John Duncan

“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.”

Milner Street, Belfast, 2004 © John Duncan

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 Newport in the late 80’s, had every intention of becoming a photojournalist…

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 Belfast. I was pretty disillusioned about their attitudes to what was going on…but when you come from a place you have an attachment, and you care about it in a certain way. And to see people who had just jetted in for a couple of days and were staying in a hotel in the centre of town made me think “What’s all that about?” I didn’t want to end up going to other countries and doing the same thing.”

© Guy lane, 2008.

Bonfires – at Wolverhampton Art Gallery 26 July 08 – 18 Oct 08

Bonfires by John Duncan. £20 (Photoworks / Steidl / Belfast Exposed Photography)