The cover of Exposure2000, a magazine which came free with The Irish Times of February 5th, 2001, to promote an exhibition of photographs by the paper's photographers, was a Frank Miller portrait of Liam Lawlor.
It is an arresting picture. It shows Mr Lawlor's head and face, taken from below, as he looks to the right. His jaw is thick-set, his lips tightly pursed, the five-o'clock shadow beginning to manifest on his upper lip. His neck, slightly twisted, seems thick in the confines of a tight, white shirt with a narrow blue stripe. His rimless glasses perch on a nose in which the nostrils loom as dark and menacing as the twin barrels of a shotgun.
I find the photograph fascinating. It has none of the "colour" or movement elements which tend to make for a captivating photographic image. It is, in many respects, a pedestrian image: the head of a not particularly photogenic man whose features are in the process of indicating something between anxiety and defiance.
I have many times found myself speculating not just about my own interest in the photograph but about the process which might have led to its use in such a flagship position. Clearly, a number of people must have looked at this photograph and decided that, of all the photographs taken during 2000, this carried the most striking message about Ireland at the beginning of a new millennium. Perhaps it does.
I recall a conversation I had during the Gulf War of 1991 with the brilliant British cultural commentator Paul Morley. We were discussing an article by Paul Johnson, then media commentator for the Spectator, who had observed about the Hollywoodesque drama being nightly enacted on the world's TV screens: "Television makes a hero out of someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli deputy foreign minister, an attractive, pleasant-looking man who tells the truth and is a personal friend of mine, and it makes a villain out of that chap, the Iraqi ambassador in Paris, who tells lies and is a fat little fellow with piggy eyes." Reflecting on the inability of the Iraqis to emerge from the visual and narrative traps which Western culture had created for them, Morley noted, more delicately: "They all have That Moustache - all of them. It becomes immediately funny. It's tragic, really."
This is close to my feelings about the Lawlor photograph: how odd it is that those we seek to demonise seem to co-operate so completely with our plans for them. How strange that we rarely choose as villains those who are pretty and in the habit of smiling. And how strange that, in seeking our targets, we invariably select people with some odd quirk of character which seems to force them to resist, to purse their lips in a sinister fashion, to grin menacingly at inappropriate moments and to walk through milling throngs of photographers as though they - how dare they! - have done nothing wrong.
It is as if, in choosing his vantage point in selecting his image for submission, Frank Miller was acting as the eyes of his time and the mind of his society. This is no more than one would expect from a fine photographer. But the final published image, bearing in mind the lengthy and elaborate process from click of shutter to plop of magazine on doormat, tells us about more than photographer or subject.
It tells us that we inhabit a land less in need of heroes than of villains. We have, it seems, a need for people who will stand in their foibles or supposed iniquity, to show our contrasting virtue in even sharper relief. It tells us also that, as though driven by an invisible force, certain of our "chosen" villains are willing to collude in our search for demons, our hunger for moral scapegoats.
We live in an economy created with mirrors that would be rejected by a carnival house of horrors as so distorting as to frighten the customers. And yet, while enjoying the fruits of our ill-gotten prosperity, we make an elaborate daily show of pursuing individuals who, we suspect, sought to do for themselves what we would have had them do for their country only.
Tribunals are trials in search of crimes. No matter how you look at it, this turns fundamental principles of justice and jurisprudence on their heads. What has been exposed is a catalogue of illustrations of how the culture of this society operated until a short time ago, with some individuals emerging as more adept than others at working it. Perhaps Lawlor's certitude derives from a sense that his integrity relates to the old, underlying culture rather than to the new, pseudo-moralistic model we seek to overlay on top?
But Liam Lawlor has not been charged with, still less convicted of, any crime. His only "offence" was questioning the right of a tribunal to force him to produce evidence which might provide ammunition against himself. How many citizens of this State freely could open wide the doors to their pasts, records and continuing personal affairs and be assured that the duly appointed authorities would find nothing amiss? Very few, I believe.
We need mirrors more than we need cameras. While we have a continuing flow of images signifying the existence of venality in high-profile individuals, there will be a minimum of pressure to look at ourselves.
jwaters@irish-times.ie