Catharsis
2011-13
in Catharsis: Images of Post-Conflict Belfast, I explore to what degree the language of the snapshot contributes to or obscures our understanding of time and place, since the idea of knowing someone through their personal images is open to question. Welding together snapshot photography from my Belfast family album with newer documentary images of urban Belfast in the post- conflict present, I situate each image in relation to an unspoken memory, and a troubled history, while marking each piece with its GPS coordinates, as a reference to its military historical legacy. Each site photographed is a former ‘Troubles’ site, now a Tourist site. Walking along the Peace walls on its Protestant side, I recall personal family album images taken on the Catholic side. The GPS is a reminder of Belfast's history with its absent military 'presence.' The stark contrast in scale and genre, between the personal snapshots and the conceptually driven documentary images, helps shape an understanding of the gap between the personal and the conceptual, mapping out ritual, marking territory and retracing history. While the family album references a site of personal and social identity, the documentary genre can only point to but never reveal the subtle and often absent history embedded within it.
