The terrain is anything but beautiful, it’s edgy and uncomfortable and heartless. Yet the images are beautiful in terms of a very particular, austere aesthetic
'I HAVE ALWAYS been fascinated by the invisible," Paul Seawright wrote in an introduction to one of his exhibitions in 2000. It's an intriguing statement because he is a photographer, and surely photography is all about the visible world. He was fascinated, he went on, by "the unseen, the subject that doesn't easily present itself to the camera". The accuracy of his self-analysis is confirmed by the nature of his work from the beginning. The beginning being a project he completed in 1988, called Sectarian Murder.
He was born in Belfast, in 1965. Throughout his teens, he was aware of a grim succession of sectarian murders proceeding in the background. When he looked back on the diaries he kept during these years, he found that he’d noted the press reports on each killing.
For Sectarian Murder, he sought out the locations where the bodies of victims had been discovered, and then photographed them as they were in the late 1980s. Images of apparently innocuous, nondescript settings were displayed with the newspaper accounts of what had happened, with one omission: the religion of the murder victims.
There was nothing specific in the images to link the places to past crimes, but as he worked Seawright realised that there were certain common characteristics to the widely disparate sites. They were all in-between spaces, tracts of wasteland, unfilled gaps in the urban fabric, anomalous pieces of open ground.
They inspired an instinctive unease, something that has been key to most of what Seawright has done since. What he has done indicates an enduring interest in, as he puts it, the "generic malevolent landscape". In the 1990s, in Orange Order and Police Force, he explored the day-to-day worlds experienced by members of the Orange Order and the RUC. That is, the literal, close-up spaces and trappings, the immediate physical and psychological environments, rather than the public face of either organisation or media representations of them.
Moving further afield, he explored the no-man’s land along the fringes of the Boulevard Périphérique, the major ringroad that encircles Paris, more or less demarcating city from suburbs; the disorientating, strangely disjointed topography of Africa’s Invisible Cities and, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in 2002, he travelled to Afghanistan, making images of vast, inscrutable barren spaces laced with the menace of hidden munitions. All these projects elaborated on the idea of “generic malevolence” as well as reaffirming his rejection of what he termed “drama-centric imagery” in photography.
Now, Volunteerat the Kerlin Gallery showcases a new body of work, one that "brings together the two major themes of his practice", rather loosely described as "contemporary cities and the representation of conflict".
The contemporary cities in this case are in 15 of the United States. The conflict is the war in Afghanistan, the most conspicuous current manifestation of what US vice president Dick Cheney, in 2005, unhappily termed America’s state of “endless war”.
Seawright visited 500 military recruiting offices. He started in Texas, “the highest recruiting state in the US”. A photojournalist would probably have seen the subject as a human interest story, depicting the young men and women who are enlisting in the armed services, encouraging us to understand what drives people to make such a choice.
Seawright doesn’t disown or disdain such questions, but he certainly doesn’t address them in conventional photojournalistic terms. People don’t feature directly at all. The places in his photographs are deserted and, most of the time, we don’t even see the recruiting offices themselves. Rather we see fragments of the environments that they are a part of, “spaces on the margins of small towns . . . a landscape littered with thrift stores, gun dealerships, fast food outlets, nightclubs, car dealerships, strip malls and pawn shops”. The sites are hard, utilitarian urban settings with everything defensively shuttered and battened down.
By their nature, architectural facades are designed for show, commercial signage is designed to make an impression. You can think of Seawright, figuratively speaking, as invariably sneaking around the back, trying to get at the aspect of a scene that isn’t designed for public consumption but is more brutally functional. If we see a logo in one of his photographs, it’s more than likely to be painted over and barely visible. There is an air of chilling anonymity to the endless expanses of blank walls, fences, parking lots, power lines and the occasional isolated plant or, as welcome as an oasis in the desert, an enclave of ragged vegetation.
Which brings us to a paradox in Seawright's work. The terrain is anything but beautiful, it's edgy and uncomfortable and heartless. All of this and more comes over in the images, and yet they are beautiful in terms of a very particular, austere aesthetic. Seawright has an eye for surfaces, textures, patterns and line. He uses his abilities not to frame pat visual narratives but to make images that prompt us to question what we are looking at, to interpret or decode them. In doing so we may find that we trace not just how the image is constructed but also how the world it represents is constructed. The work in Volunteeris oblique and requires thoughtful engagement, but it's also richly rewarding.
Volunteer by Paul Seawright. Kerlin Gallery, Anne’s Lane, South Anne St, Dublin 2
