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If you live in Portland, Oregon and you’re planning to get wed over Memorial Day weekend, why not let a Magnum Photos photographer come by and make some shots? Via.
Donovan Wylie, whose work I’ve discussed before, talks about his approach photographing the retired Maze Prison (also known as Long Kesh).
Wylie, who describes his work generally as “conceptual-documentary” attempted at the Maze to pin-point the design decisions behind the politics behind the structures.
Anna Fox
Tomorrow, the 17th March, the Deutsche Borse Prize is announced.
Two artists up for this year’s prize can fill us with humour and optimism, two others serve the cold reality of human’s strategic antagonism and ability to destroy. It depends on which worldview you prefer.
THE COLOUR OF FOX AND LEONARD
Anna Fox’s bright works are full of love and wonder but they aren’t winners … not yet. Fox has too many ongoing projects that it would be counter intuitive to make her the Deutsche Boss.
The appeal of Fox’s work is obvious part Richard Billingham, part Cindy Sherman, large part Martin Parr. Fox observes congested cupboards, Mothers Day flowers, plastic dolls and emphatic interior details with awe but without irony. All her work is colourful and her later photography staged (Country Girls). Fox’s work is a celebration of that British penchant for chintz and pattern that is rarely brought into focus. While it is distancing, Fox’s work is not distant. Necessarily the ugly brocade of a parents’ generation is balanced by the crayons of the kids’ generation, Fox’s work is unifying. It’s a winner but a winner in its mid-development, so not a winner for now.
Zoe Leonard
Zoe Leonard has a keen omnicultural view that picks out the additions and modifications that humans make to their world. Surely, it is Leonard’s wandering eye which casts wonderment upon all nations that is the attraction of her work?
Like Fox, Leonard is interested in human ingenuity. Both artists are optimistic about the utility and purpose of things. For Fox and Leonard things, as curious and benign as they may be, are material objects that budded elements of creativity and graft.
Leonard’s worldly view is generous and progressive but is it a fair reflection of our world?
THE DARKNESS OF WYLIE AND RISTELHUEBER
On the other side of the equation, Wylie and Ristelhueber – with restrained palettes – throw down their documents of strife and its aftermath with dominating conscience.
The choice you must make between the two is simple. Do you go for Wylie’s final phase ‘Troubles’ of Northern Ireland or do you go for Ristelhueber’s sprawling and ongoing multinational survey of carnage?
Do you prefer your battles contained or dispersed? Can violence be enclosed, bright-burning and abated between walls, or is conflict slower – continually popping and maiming in every country and on any old road?
Donovan Wylie
Sophie Ristelhueber
As Ristelhueber opens up space Wylie closes it down. As Wylie describes literal containment Ristelhueber prowls the unnerving territory of psychological containment. Ristelhueber’s Blowups series of craters after IED and car bomb explosions are chilling and very effective.
The ultimate difference between these two artists is that Wylie offers reprieve. Wylie recently declared his image of the Maze’s last wall to be demolished his “Best Shot”. Everyone is aware of Wylie’s Northern Irish heritage and H.M.P. Maze carries more meaning for him personally than it may for us. Wylie documented the prison’s decommission and demolition over a period of eight years. He hopes that the work be simultaneously a record of the site and a “metaphor for the peace process”.
Ristelheuber’s document of violence seemingly has no limits or borders, a notion of violence that is depressing but accurate for today’s globalised military engagement. Where do we find a peace process here? Which road or road-map do we follow here?
If Wylie’s work references the remnants of a political battle, Ristelhueber’s is record of ongoing skirmish. Ristelhueber’s photographs of blockades and bomb-craters are images not unlike those of the Northern Irish Troubles so we can identify a lineage there. However, hers are not photographs from 35 or even 15 years ago; Ristelhueber’s work shows us the violence of the 21st century.
Some might favour the distant and deadpan of Wylie’s aesthetic, but for me, for its immediacy and for its relevance, Ristelhueber should take the prize.
The inspiring Just Seeds Collective which peddles art to fund prison rights activism pointed me via its blog toward the Poster Film-Collective of London.
The Poster Film-Collective is a unique archive of graphics for African, Cultural, International, Irish, British and Women’s causes. With direct politics and robust graphics, poster arts are a nostalgic favourite for many art historians.
‘The Troubles’ of Northern Ireland are a very difficult topic for me to discuss; but not because I am close or emotionally compromised and not because I know or knew anyone involved. I grew up just the other side of the Irish Sea, but Belfast may as well have been the other side of the world to me. I was raised Catholic and my Mum’s family are from the Republic of Ireland. Yet, as a child my family rarely discussed the situation in Northern Ireland. Even in 1996, when the IRA bombed the Arndale shopping centre in Manchester (just down the M61 from my home town) the conflict was still too abstract and ancient for my teenage mind to comprehend.
I think any political labels or alliances that would fall upon my family were deflected by a distant dismay at the violence of the time. ‘The Troubles’ of Northern Ireland are not something I feel comfortable idealising; rather limply I retreat to the cliche that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. All sides (there were more than two) were guilty of arrogance, obstinacy and extreme violence. The ideological brutality played out on the streets was matched by that meted out in the prisons, most notably Long Kesh, later renamed The Maze.
It is a lingering guilt for me that ‘The Troubles’ have always been historical … historicised. It is this guilt that accounts for the fact I’ve not before discussed Donovan Wylie’s The Maze on Prison Photography. Wylie is saturated in Irish history – it is his life’s vocation. On the other hand, I would be a fraud if I attempted to summarise the complex events of a physically-close-culturally-distant conflict.
It is with similar guilt I refer readers – in the first instance – not to news reports or academic reflection but to a 2008 film. But, I do so because Steve McQueen’s Hunger is a breath-taking portrayal of a life-taking episode in the history of Maze prison. It is a wonderful observation of British prisons, Irish Republican solidarity and inmate management in the face of political protest.
McQueen, in his directorial debut, specialises in long uninterrupted shots which grip time (and all its anguish) and forces the politicised narratives through the mangle. He flattens and simplifies the visuals drawing out the incredible fragility of human skin, snow-flake, fly, lamb, ribcage … McQueen is surely a great photographer too.
Through Donovan Wylie’s work I learnt of Dr. Louise Purbrick’s excellent continuing research “concerned above all with the meanings of things and how those meanings are contained or revealed, experienced and theorised.” Purbrick wrote the essay for Donvan Wylie’s book, Maze. That was in 2004. In 2007, Purbrick extended the survey, jointly editing the book Contested Spaces. It analysed the “divided cities of Berlin, Nicosia and Jerusalem, the borderlands between the United States and Mexico, battlefields in Scotland and South Africa, a Nazi labour camp in Northern France, memorial sites in Australia and Rwanda, and Abu Ghraib.”
Purbrick worked with another academic Cahal McLaughlin on the oral history & documentary film project Inside Stories featuring Irish Republican Gerry Kelly, Loyalist Billy Hutchinson and ex-warder Desi Waterworth. And it is here I start (and I encourage you to start), with personal testimony when trying to understand ‘The Troubles’.
Donovan Wylie has continued his visual archaelogy of Irish history with Scrapbook.
Born in Belfast in 1971, DONOVAN WYLIE discovered photography at an early age. He left school at sixteen, and embarked on a three-month journey around Ireland that resulted in the production of his first book, 32 Counties (Secker and Warburg 1989), published while he was still a teenager. In 1992 Wylie was invited to become a nominee of Magnum Photos and in 1998 he became a full member. Much of his work, often described as ‘Archaeo-logies’, has stemmed primarily to date from the political and social landscape of Northern Ireland.
LOUISE PURBRICK is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton, UK. She is author of The Architecture of Containment in D. Wylie, The Maze (Granta, 2004) and, with John Schofield and Axel Klausmeier, editor of Re-Mapping the Field: New Approaches to Conflict Archaeology (Westkreuz-Verlag, 2006). She also works on the material culture of everyday life and has written The Wedding Present: Domestic Life beyond Consumption (Ashgate, 2007) (Source)
CAHAL McLAUGHLIN is Senior Lecturer in the School of Film, Media and Journalism at the University of Ulster. He is also a documentary filmmaker and is currently working on a Heritage Lottery Funded project, ‘Prison Memory Archive’.
Prison Photography 