Two photo exhibitions in Mayfair explore Irish identity from the Troubles to multicultural modernity

Words: Will Moffitt

It was during a trip to Syria with the Free Syrian Army rebels in 2012 that an impulse struck Seamus Murphy. Trekking through regime-held villages blanketed by darkness and silence, Murphy trod through the familiar topography of battle-scarred terrain. In his work as a photojournalist in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, these assignments had become all too common: winding slogs through war zones broken apart by chaos and conflict. This time his mind wandered back to Ireland.

Thirty years after leaving and travelling widely, he felt a jolting urge to go home. In many ways it was a sentiment born from feelings of restlessness and uncertainty. After years spent documenting stories in other countries, searching for the spirit of these places in photographs and snatched conversations, he wanted to reconnect with his heritage.

Murphy’s father was Irish and his mother grew up in England with Irish parents. Growing up in Dublin he recalls it being a dull, grey place in thrall to Catholicism. Returning intermittently to visit old friends and family he found a place of energy, diversity and opportunity. “Every time I went back I kept thinking: ‘God, this place is great’,” he tells me. “Would I have left if I was growing up there now? Possibly not.”

What was Ireland now, he pondered, and what did it mean to him? Those questions inspired a spree of photographs that became a book, The Republic, released in 2016 to coincide with the centenary of the Easter Rising. More than 20 of those images are now displayed at Leica Gallery in an exhibition of the same name. Depicting the people and places that define modern Irish life, Murphy scoured the streets of Dublin and the suburbs of towns and cities adapting to a new brand of multicultural life, and ventured to the rugged western shores where traditional folk and antiquated lifestyles persist.

 

Lead: Three Asian boys, Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon, (c) Seamus Murphy, image courtesy of Leica Gallery 2: Guy riding horse backwards, Co. Wexford, (c) Seamus Murphy, Leica Gallery 3: Topless dancer, Dundalk, Co. Louth, (c) Seamus Murphy, Leica Gallery

A memorable snap that became a starting point for this visual tour features a man riding a horse backwards over a steep hedge in County Wexford. It was taken in 2011. “I think they were jockeys on their day off. They were half pissed,” Murphy recalls. “One guy was trying to get over this thing and the other said: ‘for f*ck sake. I could do that backwards.’ The other jockey bet him 100 quid he couldn’t and he did.

“When I got that picture it sort of crystallised things,” he adds. “This is what I remember of Ireland. We break all the rules. No matter how civilised and rich Ireland has become there’s this great, wild streak to the Irish.”

That feral offbeat energy pulsates through another photograph of a Dixie jazz band playing a set in Dundalk, County Louth, in 2014. A shirtless man strips to the beat, buoyed by the crowd as he is grappled by a security guard.

If those frames speak to an infectious appetite for fun and well-documented Irish eccentricity others paint a less proliferated picture of a multiracial country; a place of diversity and tolerance energised by cultural change.

A sunny portrait of young boys of Pakistani origin taken in Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon, in August 2015, is a snapshot of what Murphy terms “modern Ireland”. “They lined up like a Bollywood poster, which I loved. It was perfect. They had strong Mayo accents, or strong Roscommon accents, which is just wonderful,” he says. “This is modern Ireland. This is the future of Ireland. This is the energy of Ireland.”

 

 

That optimistic outlook is all the more remarkable given the still lingering fissures from Ireland’s war-torn past. From the late 1960s to 1998 divisions along political and religious lines restructured Ireland into a hotbed of violence. Visions of balaclava-wearing paramilitaries, rage and riots still define that period known as the Troubles, stamped into the collective psyche as a reminder of how corrosive and all-consuming sectarianism can be.

Subtle hints of those divisions litter the frames of Troubled Land, an exhibition at Huxley-Parlour Gallery by British photographer Paul Graham. Made between 1984 and 1986, Graham chronicled the conflict through the country’s landscapes, daringly subverting the traditions of British documentary photography.

“I wanted to know what was going on in my name as a citizen of the United Kingdom. I went over there with complete naivety,” Graham recalls. “I wasn't a deeply political animal. I wasn't a student of politics in the serious sense, but I wanted to see with my own eyes. I got on a plane, went over there, rented a little jelly bean car and drove around.”

Known for his acclaimed work A1 – The Great North Road, which captured the humdrum comings and goings of service stations and commuters along the route, and his depictions of UK unemployment offices, Graham brought that sharp, quietly observant eye to the troubled country.

 

4: Union Flag in Tree, 1985, (c) Paul Graham, image courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery 5: Beware, Ballysillan, Belfast, 1986, (c) Paul Graham, Huxley-Parlour Gallery

 

Despite his fear and trepidation – he recalls seeing graffiti with the words We Will Wade In English Blood – he eschewed dramatic shots of inner city angst in favour of landscape photographs; a deliberate but instinctive choice as he sought to capture the reality of everyday life on the periphery.

“It's funny how you can naturally find the right place to start, you just sense it,” he tells me. “[I was] looking at things from afar, looking at things from a vantage point at a distance and seeing the small but insistent signs of division and conflict, their allegiance to one political alignment or the other.”

His photographs depict prosaic towns: rain-soaked, commonplace settings with rolling hills below cloudy skies. Sometimes they carry a ghostly, haunting quality. Signs of political unrest – xenophobic graffiti, a union flag, a kerb painted with the Irish tricolour – are subdued, part of the furniture, tiny but significant clues in these elegant compositions.

“The stuff I've always respected is the work that quietly pulls something out of the ether. Something that we all sense but have never recognized,” Graham says. “That is more powerful to me than any prize winning front page press photo.”

That sense of reflective distance, of seeing things more acutely as a detached outsider was important for Murphy. “I think I had to go to all those other places to be able to look at Ireland in that way, to be able to look at it in a critical way, to be able to see the wood for the trees,” he says, reflectively. “When you're so close to it, you don't see it.”

The Republic by Seamus Murphy runs until March 6 at Leica Gallery, 64-66 Duke Street. Troubled Land by Paul Graham at Huxley-Parlour Gallery, 45 Maddox Street, closes March 1