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Gallery Visit - FOAM Amsterdam. 5.11.2019 Lorenzo Vitturi - Materia Impura. FOAM has gathered a decade of Vitturi’s work split into three spaces. The landing space when you enter the exhibition is dedicated to a photography and mixed media exhibition exploring familial and cultural links. Vitturi’s father was a Murano glass blower and in the ‘60s he emigrated to Peru in the hope to set up a glass factory. Vitturi himself an immigrant ( he lives and works in London and no stranger to exploring the themes of cultural identity - establishing himself with his series ‘Dalston Academy’ where he recorded a rapidly gentrifying area using his own special brand of photography colliding with sculpture ) he understands the upheaval that changing your axis can bring. His father dropped balmy Italy for the dry plains of peru and Vitturi uses UV prints on glass reminiscent of his father’s Murano business, and foam or resin - which conjures up images of the shipping containers used to transport goods or passengers between Italy and Peru. Much like Dalston Academy (which was displayed in an anteroom further into the building) Vitturi focuses on materials to give his photographic work a boost. In a globalised world he has tried to bind his father’s adoptive country with his own through photography and sculpture, enmeshing the two yet contrasting their differences. In Dalston Academy he displays pigments and vegetables on top of portraits of traders from the Dalston Market and re-photographs the arrangements to make these fragments part of the image. Many photographers are uneasy about the inclusion of sculpture or mixed media which I can understand. Is it strict photography? Vitturi demonstrates that when done in a sympathetic manner it can elevate the photographic image. The photographer always sets their own intention and constructs their own narrative - Vitturi seems to always have his clearly mapped and this prevents the collision of multiple disciplines from ever being a gimmick.

Daragh Soden ( b. 1994 ) manages to capture the same timeless quality that Clements has with his series ‘Young Dubliners’. Only one year younger than myself - Soden has also expressed the same sentiments that I have been trying to express through this blog: “I grew up in a country in full social and economical prosperity, then in 2008, everything got out of control. The country went into recession, the deficit increased, companies closed, unemployment wreaked havoc. That period really influenced my identity” Soden was presumably shooting with medium format due to the square crop and the gorgeous colours and grain have given the series a pastel palette that almost feels like an already washed-out memory. The photographer has chosen to portray a changing Dublin through the youth culture, and is sympathetic to his subjects, like Ogden - he has allowed them to pose as they liked. This is the post-recession generation and Ireland is no longer a monocultural society - Soden gently records this change without pandering to this shift.

Krass Clement ( b. 1946, Denmark ) spent three months in Ireland in 1991. One evening of which he made his infamous book ‘Drum’ that followed an elderly punter in a small town pub. Clement also spent time in Dublin, capturing the ‘rare aul town in the years before massive economic development and bougie co-working spaces. It’s not just Clement’s choice of black and white film stock that give this series a historial bent - the photographer plays with scale, amplifying the water towers and gas works that dominate the skyline and he even captures a pastoral, almost chocolate-box scene of a jarvey racing a sheepdog against a mixture of georgian and victorian buildings, the tarmac glossy from the rain and the streets free of visual clutter begging the mind for attention. His series feels like a Roddy Doyle film, salt-of-the-earth types in shellsuits mingle in a city centre that still belongs to them and the evidence of their common history still allowed to co-exist. Back then, Dublin was poor and there was no incentive to rip these communities apart. Nostalgia can be dangerous, but Clement’s work is almost hard to look at, the kids seem happy and not entirely disaffected as DuBois’ friends in Cork. It seems like the place I’ve only heard about in song.

Doug DuBois ( b.1960 Michigan ) spent 5 years with Co.Cork teenagers for his series ‘My Last Day at Seventeen’. Documenting the boredom faced by kids on the Russell Heights estate and the tableaux of the suburban childhood.

Working with medium format film, the photographer has managed to amplify the rich colours: an amber bottle of Devil’s Bit Cider, a pyjama clad girl hopping a wall or kids in varying blocks of coloured streetwear performing a bizarre parkour vignette.

The Photographer arrived to Ireland on a residency with a gallery in Cobh, but struggling to make any work of relevance he stumbled upon the teenagers who extended their hospitality or possibly just curiosity at a strange cultural scavenger. DuBois has said:

“A few weeks into my residency and frustrated by my lack of progress on any kind of a project, I asked the group of kids to take me to their neighborhoods and show me around. Kevin and Eirn offered to take me to “the steps” which turned out to be a drinking spot for under-aged kids in and around Cobh. Later that night, Kevin took me to his house in Russell Heights, a housing estate with a mix of working and middle class homes, some council housing and the like.

I met his family and some neighbors, made a photograph of Roisin in her bedroom and realized almost immediately that this was my entrée into a compelling and complex corner of Irish life.I went back to Russell Heights the next day and almost every day after that first encounter.

Sometimes people drove by and called us “fucking pervs;” sometimes they called the local garda (police) who would check my ID; and once in a while someone would agree to be photographed.I worked with an assistant, Ivan Rynn who was studying photography in nearby Cork. We shot with a 4x5, two 6x7 cameras and the occasional strobe. We were hardly a discreet presence, which worked to our advantage since no one could accuse us of sneaking photographs or spying on their lives.”

These images are not too dissimilar to my own memories of suburban life in the 2010s - the semi-detached dream looked as similar in DuBois’ Co.Cork to the one I experienced in Co.Kildare. Again, like O’Connaill and Cian Óg Arnold - DuBois has also picked up on the grotty hallmarks of Irish environments and the detail afforded by the medium format camera has made the grotty almost beautiful.

Even the term for the drinking hole was the same used in my locality, going down ‘the steps’ was a rite of passage and even with a declining alcohol consumption rate amongst teens - Ireland still has one of the worst teen drinking rates in the world. Perhaps a failing of the local government to ensure appropriate facilities for the growing mind - DuBois has picked up on those neglected in favour of more profitable enterprises. It is likely that policies in favour of developers allowed Co.Cork to end up with 90 ghost estates the likes of Valérie Anex was busy documenting. DuBois sensitive records of kids on the precipice serve as a reminder that a childhood is a process and that needs to be nurtured.

Valérie Anex ( b.1983 ) is a Swiss/Irish artist who beautifully documented the Ghost Estates of Ireland. They make a compelling subject and many have waded into the territory, but Anex’s clean compositions reinforce the Stepford qualities of these acres of wasted materials. Particularly in an age where plastic straws are objectum-non-grata, the sheer volume of off-gassing PVC, timber and concrete is mind-boggling. The lack of watertight plots mean that the structures are probably rotting to the core and will in time be completely unsalvageable. “The house is an object full of very strong symbols,” she said via email. “It is inevitable that when people discover through my images the existence of these inhabited brand-new houses, they start to ask themselves: What has happened? What are the historical forces that lead to this absurd situation? How is it possible to construct houses if there aren’t any people willing to live in them? Where does this surplus come from? Why this waste of labor, resources and energy?”

Jill Quigley ( b.1981 Co.Donegal ) transformed abandoned homes in rural Donegal for her series ‘Cottages of Quigley’s Point’. Staging a series of ‘interventions’ the photographer explored forgotten homes in the ‘forgotten county’, annexed to the most northerly corner with no motorway connections and its train links long since removed. Like O’Halloran and O’Connaill, Quigley has zeroed in on a unique aspect of our built heritage - Donegal has the largest concentration of Irish vernacular housing. Free from the conventions of colonial proportions, these houses belong to the Irish entirely and were erected by communities - an old Irish tradition ‘meitheal’ has no direct translation but loosely means a gang who help with a task such as building a house or harvesting a crop. On first read, the series could be interpreted as nostalgic or a comment on the intrinsic romantic value of these homes, but the photographer has deliberately subverted our expectations of ruin-porn and the interventions are more about situating herself into these local points of interest.

"Cottages of Quigley's Point" documents interventions in abandoned vernacular dwellings in my local area of County Donegal. In a landscape dominated by the legacy of the recent housing boom, the remains of these older cottages are easily found, down country lanes and hidden in clumps of trees. They are known in the community by the names of the families that last lived in them, whether these families still live in the area or have moved away. These lingering names reflect how personal histories linger in rural areas even as they remain part of contemporary life.It is common to read images of derelict cottages in a nostalgic light, celebrating the simplicity of an older way of life with a romantic attachment to hearth and home. This romanticising tendency precludes the encountering of such spaces as they actually are, as part of the landscape as it is now. The interventions are intended as a fresh approach to subject matter that would otherwise be considered an evocation of the past. The addition of bright colors and movement situate the subject in the present, briefly reanimating it in the encounter, and marking exploration of this redundant yet accessible aspect of the locality. My motive with this project is to disrupt rather than oppose traditional imagery of the Irish cottage, avoiding the dichotomy of the romanticized and the real. Rather, by interrupting the static interiors of these buildings, I add an active and particular dimension to this element of the rural landscape, pursuing a personal means of negotiating past and present in my local community” - Jill Quigley

Ciarán Óg Arnold ( b.1977 ) photobook ‘I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed. but all I could do was to get drunk again’ documents life in his small hometown on the Atlantic seaboard and the desultory nightlife post-recession.

These illuminated alleyways and corners of damp nightclubs are so expertly portrayed it feels like you can almost smell the decay. Like Eoin O’Connaill’s Common Places series - the unglamorous side of rural life reveals itself however Arnold turns the lens towards the people themselves and also works through his own unmet desires of finding love in this atmosphere:

“You don’t understand how you look to others. The women would look at you as if you were dirt,” he says. “You go out looking for a woman and never get one, so you just get hammered and go home.”

The photographer has distilled the aggression that idleness brings, and his work unpacks the masculine tendency to fulfill to this urge - his isolated male subjects seem fizzing with confrontational energy. In one picture 6 men mull around a nightclub punching bag - no doubt filling their time with japes before the mating klaxon of the witching hour sounds and the task of finding someone to bring home to bed, or a way home begins. Arnold has decapitated a lot of his subjects, giving them anonymity which small towns rarely afford their residents and possibly telling that he saw enough of himself in his subjects to understand that the desperation is better kept in the half-lit rooms and smoking areas.

Perry Ogden ( b.1961 ) was most likely an inspiration to both Barr and Kauffman, with his 1999 photo series ‘Pony Kids’. He photographed young Traveller boys with and without their steeds after finding them at Dublin’s 300 year old Smithfield Horse Fair. Ogden, an English photographer - went on to make the multi-award winning 2005 film ‘Pavee Lackeen’ which follows a young Traveller girl: Winnie and her life with her mother, camping in an industrial estate on the outskirts Dublin. It’s worth noting that two strong bodies of work that emphatically follow young Travellers were made by two ‘foreigners’ as is the case of Ogden and Kauffman. This fresh perception comes without the prejudice that an Irish person may bring, and allows for these individuals to be seen for the rich and varied culture they come from. Ogden is mainly known for his fashion photography - and he has brought his commercial sensibilities to this series. The stark white background and high contrast photographs with black border are almost an homage to Richard Avedon’s ‘In The American West’ collection. Ogden has said: “I came across the pony kids at the Smithfield Horse Fair, the monthly horse fair in Dublin. I went along and it was amazing. I was introduced to this culture, these kids mainly from the suburbs of Dublin owning and riding horses. What captured me was their energy and enthusiasm; this meeting of Traveller and Settled culture, of this old culture of horses coming together with Nike and Adidas sportswear. And their haircuts, too. It was fascinating. I went to the market whenever I was in Dublin on the first Sunday of the month. I really wanted to document it, but to do it against a plain background with reflected light to capture the kids themselves; their clothes and their haircuts. I’d go there early in the day and set up a little studio space and then start walking around, asking kids to come and be photographed. By about 11 o’clock or midday, there would be so many people, kids saying ‘Mister, Mister, get me on this one’ or ‘get me with this dog’ or chicken or pigeon or whatever it might be.” Again, like Kauffman - the photographer is careful to allow his subjects the freedom to portray themselves the way they wish to be seen. He allowed the boys to approach him, giving them time to establish trust and overcome any suspicion. Representation matters and these boys have positioned themselves with both teenage irreverence and power, this is especially poignant in an age where the low-frequency hum of gentrification looms large - this clip shows the historic square in 1997 during an open call for redesign submissions, where even a non-traveller local bemoans the fact that they are being pushed out of the area in favour of wealthier classes - Travellers got even less of a look in. The Travelling community also faced upheaval through public policy - with the 1996 ‘Control of Horses act’. This ensured tighter controls for animal welfare, but for the Travelling community this was another gauntlet to navigate in a changing Ireland that didn’t appear to belong to them. Ogden has the same foresight that O’Halloran and Franklin shared - a perception that a nation was changing and pushed his camera in the direction of those who may be left behind.

Birte Kauffman ( b 1981 ) is another photographer who extensively explored the customs and culture of the Irish Traveller community with her 2011-2015 series ‘The Travellers’. The subjects appear to be completely at ease, most likely owing to the time and care that the German-born photographer put into the series stretching over 4 years. Certainly, no mean feat considering that most Irish people would not be able to call any Traveller a friend. The negative representation of their culture in the Irish media and pre-conceived perceptions have plagued the traveller population - this is slowly being undone with organisations committed to improving their rights and cross-community integration. She wrote: “I wanted to capture the travellers` way of life and their values in pictures. In doing so, I did not want to romanticize them, but rather show their everyday life. A life where people still hunt rabbits and where horses play a vital role. But it is also a life that contains hardship and boredom from an early age.” Like Christopher Barr’s series ‘Katabasis’ - Kauffman has captured the familiar iconographical punctuations of the shared settled-Irish experience and the Traveller one - communion dresses, virgin Mary statuettes in the window and a drinking seisiún, but she also succeeded in documenting their stronger links to the natural world through their horses, dog breeding and traditional crafts. For me this series represents a peek ‘over-the-fence’ at an ethnic minority who are so often maligned but who are closer to the collective Irish traditions and history than most will ever be.

Christopher Barr, a Belfast-based photographer chose to deep-dive into the Traveller community as part of his ongoing series ‘Katabasis’ ( an ancient Greek word meaning ‘descent’ ) Working on the project for over a decade, the photographer initially wanted to follow the importance of the horse within the Traveller community. Economically important - horse fairs are a large part of income for Travellers, and before car ownership became common, Travellers were dependant on horses to lead their caravans and fulfil their migrant lifestyle. The series evolved into a study on crime within the community - after an unexpected encounter with infamous Traveller Pa Rubber Óg O’Reilly he became a friend and O’Reilly revealed more of himself and his dealings as time progressed. It’s evident in the photographs that Barr persevered and situated himself intimately in homes with families and within groups of Traveller men. They would in-turn test his mettle out of suspicion, challenging him to brawls and playing tricks on him. Discrimination against Travellers is rife, and with Traveller men 7 times more likely to die by suicide compared to the general Irish population - their suspicion is warranted. This persistence has allowed the photographer to capture the inner circles of the community, and explore the dark underbelly where a cycle of discrimination, neglect and lack of opportunity has allowed crime to flourish. With Travellers comprising of 10% and 22% of the respective total male and female Irish prison population, despite making up just 0.6% of the entire population - the temptation for fraud and racketeering is growing at an exponential rate. Barr was careful to exclude the usual hallmarks of criminal activity, choosing to capture the downtime and also portray these people for the kind fathers and friends that they are. This gives an even account and the photographer has also hinted that he would like to publish the work as co-authored with O’Reilly - accompanying the photographs with text, and giving that much needed agency back to the community.

Eoin O’Connaill ( b. 1979 ) is another contemporary Irish photographer documenting a post-recession landscape. His series ‘Common Places’ ( no doubt a reference to Stephen Shore’s 1982, large format, American landscape series ‘Uncommon places’ ) depicts the less salubrious corners of Ireland with strong, artful compositions and usually in tandem with broody weather. Like O’Halloran, O’Connaill is adept at isolating the markers that speak for themselves, choosing to masterfully angle the damp and dreary spaces into beautiful arrangements. Efflorescent bricks, trentepohlia and black mould work with the grain of the photographs to make these spaces scream dirt and neglect. They seem like they are less about the scenes as they appear but the attitudes of those who inhabit them. The photographer has said: “This project “Common Place” is about photographing the places we pass daily, the estates and side streets that we often take no notice of but that contain all the information necessary to highlight the political and social issues that are prevalent in the country. This project was made in 2006-2007 during the height of the economic boom where prosperity had transformed many of the notions that were seen as “Irish” and certainly the perception of ourselves as a nation and of this country internationally was changing. It felt almost like a re branding exercise was in motion, this idea of the modern cosmopolitan country of landmark developments were being pushed to the fore. I wanted to highlight the distance I believed existed between the reality of our everyday existence and the stereotype of place, recognizing the large changes occurring both culturally, socially and physically without making this change the sole focus of the work. This project therefore addresses the recurring enigma of trying to document and represent social and physical change without the obvious visual pointers but looking instead to the everyday landscape where buildings wait to be transformed, where subtle changes hint at what has passed and what is to come, where the optimism and base reality of human existance are witnessed as a people survive, possibly strive and generally get by”

Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin ( b.1956, London ) famous for his 1989 photographs of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square student protests, spent some time in Dublin in 2003. Like O’Halloran - it seems that Franklin had an almost nostradamus-like prediction of the perils of an economic boom: container ships ready to berth at Dublin port, laden with status symbols and the products of excess, queues for ATMs in Dublin city centre while a begging woman waits at the foot of the machines and the annual Trinity college ball where mostly affluent, privately educated students sweatily danced and were known to flaunt their status. “Good photographs aren't just complex. They are enigmatic. Images are beguiling. And the way they play into our psychology, into our visual cortex, is something we still don't understand.” - Stuart Franklin” This prophetic and quiet look into a culture intoxicated by the wealth afforded by ‘90s tax cuts, an increasingly educated workforce and a culture of borrowing is in marked contrast to Franklin’s other work - a prolific photographer; he is known for his conflict work. The Troubles in Northern Ireland, civil war in Sri Lanka and famine in Sudan. Like O’Halloran - these images were made during my formative years, and the hallmarks of the Celtic Tiger are some of my earliest memories. My sister worked in a city centre restaurant, frequently returning home in the early mornings with three figure tips in her purse. Consequently, she was offered a full mortgage at 26 on a waitressing wage. These tales are part of a collective hangover - 100% mortgages and credit cards have binded an entire generation into negative equity, emigration or a lifetime of debt and for those too young to be of working age during the boom - a sense of material loss for the experiences or comforts that we will never have. Franklin even visited my hometown, capturing a clean bay at Intel - a large, multinational manufacturer of computer chips once dubbing Leixlip as Ireland’s ‘Silicon Valley’. This foresight and research cements this work as being of great personal importance to me - Leixlip was filled with workers who served in the plant during the week and left at the weekends. There were no facilities for young people in the community except sport and this clear preference in government policy for corporations over citizens was another hollow archetype of neoliberalism.

Kenneth O’Halloran ( b.1968, Co.Clare ) is a Dublin based photographer whose series ‘Tales From The Promised Land’ follows the numerous property expos and ghost estates during the Celtic Tiger. Shortlisted for the Terry O’Neill Award 2010, the photographer has taken his hallmark thoughtful and sensitive approach and brought with it some tongue in cheek humour. I chose the image of the bored child as the starting point of this blog because I was that child. My parents were retirement age during the peak of the boom and bought property in Spain. The house loomed over me like a giant, terracotta step-sibling that I hated with a passion and many teenaged summers were spent locked in an air-conditioned bedroom with the curtains drawn, one hand in the air to get enough signal to load primitive social media in order to keep up with mates back in Ireland. Eventually, as all highs are followed by lows - the economy based on infinite credit collapsed and my parents were forced to live permanently in that pied-à-terre. Their pension travelled further on the Costa Blanca and thus at 19 years of age I was the sole occupant of my family home. When I stumbled across the series online, I was rumbled with an odd feeling of grief. Not only had my own home been fractured by promises of a better land in La Marina Urbanisation, but the scars of this grotesque period were already being dragged across the country with cement and decking. There are 621 ghost estates dotted around the 26 counties which bring untold problems in both social contexts and practical - with no maintenance on an unprofitable shell - these abandoned cash-cows have become dangerous, unsightly and a monument to the untold levels of greed. These half-finished houses, built as surplus in a time of plenty are even more of a sore point considering the state is experiencing one of the worse housing shortages in modern times. Fair Eireann is no stranger to bungling housing supplies - the lack of state initiative fueled the instant bestseller of 1971 ‘Bungalow Bliss’ - a catalogue of bungalow designs drawn by architect and engineer Jack Fitzsimons. This gave young Irish people a short term housing solution but ultimately resulted in a pockmarked countryside, an over-reliance on cars and the strangulation of rural town centres. O’Halloran proves that his work is no happy accident, his 2018 typology ‘Handball Alley’ documents the crumbling relics of the Gaelic Athletic Association’s forgotten 3rd sport. Reminiscent of Berndt and Hilla Bescher’s Blast Furnaces - he lovingly records these curious structures with the reverence of someone who understands the multitudes of uses or covert cover those three walls provided. “These are relics of a once vibrant chapter of Irish life. Like the dolmens John Montague crafted as a metaphor for the old people of his childhood, the ruins of these abandoned alleys bear silent testimony to a feature of Ireland that has perished through time and modernization. These plain walls were once the thriving open-air theatres of their day. They were familiar meeting points, where people played games long into long summer evenings, and others gathered for simple companionship and discourse. The alleys came alive at a time in Ireland when human interaction needed little in the way of sophisticated props or accompaniments. In rural Ireland in particular, handball captured the public imagination and societies grew around the games and the alleys which staged them. They became prized places of refuge, offering an escape from ordinary, hard-working lives.“ The ghost estates are without the romance of the handball alleys, but the photographer is no less careful in his approach and all are equally resonant with me for the uncanny ability to distil Ireland and the Irish into succinct moments. In this blog I will attempt to unpick the threads of enquiry that O’Halloran has provoked in me, and explore work based on or linked to this fledgeling nation state approaching its centenerary.

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