Photographing the hunger strikes

How can you photograph something you cannot see? This is a question which confronted Ireland’s photojournalists during six long months in 1981. From spring through to autumn of that year, the hunger strikes were never far from the headlines. When Bobby Sands began to refuse food, the front pages of the Irish daily newspapers reported in detail on every slow painful effect of starvation on his body. Each pound he lost, his declining eyesight, the trauma on his organs, and final entrance to hospital and descent into coma were discussed in grim detail. This cycle was repeated nine more times as summer progressed, new men went on hunger strike, gradually became weaker, and passed away.

As these slow effects of hunger crept across bodies inside the cells of the H-Blocks, the streets outside became tenser. It was this atmosphere Ireland’s photojournalists recorded; unable to get near Sands or the other hunger strikers they were confined to recording the effect of the hunger strike on the body politic – clashes between civilians and police, marches, and, inevitably, set-piece funerals. When Francis Hughes died on the 59th day of hunger strike in May 1981, The Irish Times led with a picture of gardaí baton-charging youths throwing stones at the British embassy in Dublin while, inside, another photograph revealed a demonstrator on the ground surrounded by gardaí clad in riot gear.

The hunger strikes were, like all those that preceded them, a media event, which gained their momentum and meaning through the mobilisation of public opinion via the dissemination of tokens and images. This process is apparent in Derek Speirs’s depiction of Joe McDonnell’s funeral, which appeared in Magill magazine in August 1981. A crowd watch as three IRA men stand above a coffin draped in a tricolour, discharging their guns skywards in salute. The carefully composed image was intended to display the unity of the Catholic community in support of the hunger strikers: men, women, and children standing – literally – shoulder to shoulder behind the coffin. In the window of the house behind, Joe McDonnell stared out from a photograph, placed there as a reminder of the youth and humanity of a man whose death had become a political spectacle. However, Speirs complicates the image – and its message – with the inclusion of three young men taking photographs perched on the wall behind the crowd. We can only speculate on what they are recording – presumably a sea of photographers and journalists matching the crowd of mourners. This image of photographers meeting each other’s gaze and recording each other’s presence is indicative of how the hunger strikes became a spectacle performed on the street for international consumption.

But the images which stay with us from the period are not, however, these journalistic attempts to capture the mood of the streets, but rather portrait photographs of the strikers, taken before their imprisonment. A photograph of Bobby Sands smiling was reproduced and reproduced over and over again in the papers. Despite its close cropping to exclude his domestic surroundings, the blurred lines of the picture make it unmistakably a snapshot, and in so doing create an image of Sands not as an IRA member but as an ordinary young man. When Sands died on May 5th, this smiling image appeared everywhere across Ireland and Britain, reproduced in newspapers, magazines and on television. These photographs also took on a talismanic quality for the hunger strikers’ supporters across the Irish world. In London, Joanne O’Brien, working for the women-only photography collective Format, recorded images of women protesting in support of the hunger strikers in Trafalgar Square, all displaying these snaps of Sands and the other men. In nis portrayal of a vigil at the GPO after the death of Joe McDonnell, Kevin McMahon turned his back on the speakers on the platform to photograph the crowd, many of whom were carrying banners displaying again and again the faces of the hunger strikers. Indeed, these images resonate and continue to appear on murals and in new media forms. The continuing impact of these warm, amateur snapshots is indicative of the fact that the hunger strikes became not only a political standoff but a painful emotional event which has had a lasting effect on Ireland to this day.