The Long View David Farrell | Anthony Haughey | Jackie Nickerson | Richard Mosse | Paul Seawright | Donovan Wylie 1 The Long View 1 July – 28 August 2011 A group show with works by David Farrell Anthony Haughey Richard Mosse Jackie Nickerson Paul Seawright Donovan Wylie Introduction © Justin Carville, Ph.D Curated by Tanya Kiang and Trish Lambe Cover image: David Farrell, ‘Cogalstown Wood, Wilkinstown’, from the series Small Acts of Memory, 26 September 2009 © David Farrell Back cover image: Donovan Wylie, ‘Golf 40 facing South East’, from the series British Watchtowers, 2005 © Donovan Wylie Image right: Paul Seawright, ‘Police’, from the series Conflicting Account, 2009 © Paul Seawright The Gallery of Photography is proud to be supported by The Arts Council and Dublin City Council. 2 Gallery of Photography Ireland is delighted to present a review of the 2011 group exhi- bition The Long View, which brought together, for the first time, work by Irish artists with considerable international reputations and whose photographs are represented in major collections worldwide. The featured works are the result of a sustained process of engagement over periods of months or even years. The exhibition addresses questions of landscape and memory, history and social change in both Irish and more global contexts. It explores a particular strand of international practice, showcasing what can be called ‘considered’ or ‘deceler- ated’ photography. The featured photographers are part of this tradition seeking to work against the disposable and short-sighted nature of 21st-century mass media practices, and their photographs are the result of a sustained process of engagement over periods of months or even years. The work thus marks an important counterpoint to the increas- ingly disposable nature of photographic images in the digital world. The curators would like to thank the artists, Justin Carville, Pete Reddy, the Arts Council, Dublin City Council, Leszek, Maureen & Mark at Fire, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, Mil- lennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, PhotoIreland Festival, Stephen Snoddy, Look11 Liverpool, Belfast Exposed and Magnum Photos. For further information about the exhibition, please visit our resources page at www.galleryofphotography.ie Cover image: © David Farrell Images: © the artists Essay: © Justin Carville, Ph.D Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland T. +3531-6714654 www.galleryofphotography.ie 3 Photographers David Farrell explores the sensitive subject of the search for those who were ‘disap- peared’ by the Republican movement, in a series of landscape studies from a project that has spanned over a decade. Anthony Haughey addresses the spectral presence of ghost estates on the contem- porary landscape. Through Haughey’s lens, these eerie ‘monuments’ are a testament to the end of Ireland’s gold rush and the resulting cost of unregulated growth. Richard Mosse also explores the visual possibilities of the monumental, in both the subject matter and the sublime scale of his work. Mosse recasts the sculptural form of an airplane wreck into a powerful symbol of the failure of modernity. Jackie Nickerson also works on a very large scale and in a global context, but she focusses on how we inhabit our ordinary, everyday worlds, presenting her own, often ambivalent, subjective position. Made over a ten-year period, the work on show explores the interplay between the global and the local in the newly affluent Gulf states. Paul Seawright recovers visual fragments and texts from the surfaces of the urban landscape of his native Belfast. The work examines the continued play of competing claims to meaning and identity in a post-conflict context. Donovan Wylie presents two bodies of work which operate on widely different registers. In his cool, objective aerial survey of British Watchtowers along the border, he deftly turns the surveyor into the surveyed; while in Scrapbook, he presents ‘the Troubles’ as an intimate aspect of lived experience, in a radical mix-up of the private and the public. A full-colour publication with a text by Justin Carville accompanies the exhibition, first published in 2011. Justin Carville, Ph.D teaches Historical & Theoretical Studies in Photography at the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dún Laoghaire, Ireland. 4 lie hidden beneath the bound surface of Enduring the image. Vision In the initial response to this straight- The Optics of The Long forward request, Plato immediately complicates any forthright attempt to View define representation with more abstract considerations; “Then it is not very likely I shall!’ ‘Oh, I don’t know’, I said. ‘Short sight Justin Carville, Ph.D is sometimes quicker than long sight’”.3 The pursuit to define the nature of rep- resentation is suddenly dulled by corpo- real vision, and in turn corporeal vision is In book Ten of Plato’s Socratic dialogue warped by temporality and distance. For The Republic, a question is posited on the Plato, rational sight is corrupted by the nature of representation. It initiates the myopia of the human eye, emphasising at eventual dismissal of the artist’s ability the very outset the scepticism with which to represent anything other than a shad- the designation of ‘representation’ and the owy reflection of a distant reality thrice ‘image’ must be viewed. removed.1 In a syntax which betrays its searing interrogation of the contiguity The history of representation and the phi- of image to reality, the question that is losophy of the image are bound to the in- bluntly proposed for deliberation is: “Can creased myopia of Western visual culture. you give me a general definition of repre- The evolutionary arch of mimetic forms sentation? I’m not sure I know, myself, of image production is a reflection of the exactly what it is”.2 Frequently in the realm West’s cultural fetish for the increased of critical enquiry, the more direct the veracity of pictorial images.4 With the ad- question, the more complex its subject ap- vent of technically reproduced imagery, pears to become. Hanging in the rarefied the desire for pictorial verisimilitude has air of philosophical reflection, this simplest combined with the urge, as Walter of questions lingers in anticipation of a Benjamin described it, ‘to bring things more contemplative response to the blunt closer spatially and humanly ... by way of manner in which it was asked. Through its likeness, its reproduction’.5 its plainly stated form, this modest query harbours the potential to unravel the 3The Republic, p. 371 (my emphasis) intricacies of representation which usually 4 This of course is a technically determined perspective of Western modernity espoused by media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan. See for example Marshall McLuhan, ‘In- 1 Plato, The Republic, trans. H.D.P. Lee, (London: Penguin side the Five Sense Sensorium’ in David Howes, ed. Empire Classics), 1987, pp. 371-74. The classic interpretation of Pla- of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, to’s iconophobia in the context of photography is of course 2005), p. 43-52 Susan Sontag’s in the opening chapter of On Photography 5 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechani- (London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 3-24 cal Reproduction’, 1936, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn 2The Republic, p. 371 (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 217 5 Anthony Haughey ‘Untitled VI’, from the series Settlement, 2011 Lambda c-print facemounted to plexi © Courtesy of the artist 6 In the history of ileging of the ‘now’ in the instantaneous technological looking, landscape of images. Photography con- photography sits in the stitutes a rush to judgement, a quickening of the perception and reception of things. departure lounge of this The mass media use photography in pre- inevitable journey towards cisely this way. Accelerating the disposal of one redundant photograph by another the privileging of the redundant photograph, the mass media ‘now’ in the instantaneous limit any response to the image by re- stricting its temporal presence before the landscape of images. gaze of the observer to the arrival of the next instantaneous image of catastrophe.7 Mimetic capacity and distance have co- Yet photography remains in the departure alesced in the realm of technical imagery lounge only, it follows the journey but does to the extent that the close proximity of not become a willing passenger. Its optic the viewer to the world as image as much is split; it is both embedded in the myopia as the image’s pictorial veracity have of the visual field yet resistant to its cul- become a marker of realism. In the arena tural logic. Its other optic is the antithesis of digital imagery, the perpetual communi- of the accelerated myopia identified by cation of the internet and mobile technol- Virilio and other media philosophers as ogies, mimesis and distance have in turn characteristic of the dystopian image been enveloped by speed. The logic of the environment of contemporary culture. This image-world that now prevails has result- other optic is the ‘long view’, an enduring, ed in mimesis and proximity collapsing decelerated gaze that steps back from the under the weight of instantaneity. In con- object it represents. temporary visual culture, ‘real-time’ and the accelerated consumption of images David Farrell’s Small Acts of Memory is have now come to determine accessibility exemplary of photography’s other optic. to the real. The French cultural theorist Following his 2000 series Innocent Land- Paul Virilio has observed that through this scapes, Farrell has continued to photo- instantaneous image world ‘humanity is graph the sites of the excavations of the struck with myopia’, sight is subjected to ‘disappeared’.8 This has been a periodic a sudden foreclosure, a narrowing and exercise of documenting the intermittent constricting of the field of vision.6 rupture of the earth by the industrial ex- cavations of forensic search teams which In the history of technological looking, 7 I use the term ‘observer’ here deliberately to empha- photography sits in the departure lounge size what Jonathan Crary identifies as an action that of this inevitable journey towards the priv- ‘conforms’ and ‘complies’ to seeing ‘within a prescribed set of possibilities’.