A natural instinct for the decisive moment

Visual Arts: Fergus Bourke could be described as an old fashioned snapper, which is partly what makes his current retrospective, at the Gallery of Photography, so enjoyable, writes Aidan Dunne.

Partly that, and partly the fact that he clearly possesses a natural instinct for timing and framing a picture, an instinct that was certainly there to begin with, but has been honed by decades of experience. In pictorial terms alone, some of his achievements are quite breath-taking.

Organised thematically, the exhibition marshals formidable bodies of work in every genre he chooses to explore. It is immediately striking that the Ireland he depicts in the 1960s and even the 1970s looks like another country. The sparse scattering of cars on Dame Street and the desolate urban landscape around Newmarket are equally shocking in their different ways, for differing reasons. It's not so much the clothes and haircuts of the inner-city dwellers that place them in time, as the way they seem to inhabit a harder, tougher world, a world of grittier textures and greater poverty.

Whether photographing people or the uninhabited landscape of the west of Ireland, Bourke is always a dramatist at heart.

He responds to the theatre of markets, fairs and festivals with an unerring eye for character, homing in on the telling gesture, the exchanged glance, the sideways look, the visual detail that says much more than words ever could. The great exponent of "the decisive moment" is Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose photography galvanised Bourke. But much of his work here also recalls the early Jack B. Yeats, immersed in his subject and clearly relishing the culture of the west at play, in drawings and paintings overflowing with life. Similarly, Bourke's sympathetic engagement with communities allows him to produce images from the inside.

His empathic responsiveness also makes him a great portrait photographer. He is very good at types: street urchin, corner boy, farmer, dealer. So good, that on occasion you wonder whether he is merely confirming the stereotype or actively defining it. But he is also terrific with individuals who do not conform to type. A roomful of parent and child portraits provides an extraordinary wealth of emotionally charged images, simple in their format and presentation but beautifully made and endlessly complex in their psychological layering. They include John Boorman with daughter Telsche, Seamus Heaney with daughter Catherine, Charles Haughey with Sean.

Bourke can turn quite happily from this fascinated engagement with people and towns to the unpeopled landscape.

His Connemara images, from majestic, panoramic views of the Twelve Bens to atmospheric studies of rain-sodden country lanes, are an enraptured and heartfelt response to a stunning place. He is particularly fond of May, and has produced many lush, lyrical springtime views of hawthorns almost iridescent with masses of blossom.

Never afraid to crank up the drama, he shares common ground here with brother Brian Bourke's marvellously airy landscapes.

Here, every picture does tell a story, sometimes with a high degree of stage-management. Flight 133 leaves a vapour trail en route to Boston, high above a village deserted since the Great Famine. The point is pressed home, perhaps a bit blatantly, but in the form of a dazzling piece of picture- making. Time and again throughout the exhibition Bourke does something similar. You feel he's quite pleased with his own sleight-of-hand. So he should be.

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