Building up to a conflagration

VISUAL ARTS:STARTING IN 2002, in his ongoing series of photographs Boom Town, John Duncan has documented the rapid pace of development in post-ceasefire Belfast.

Dramatic phases of development often have the appearance of obliterating or covering over the traces of the past. Certainly that has been true of the several building booms in the South since the 1960s. It was even truer in Belfast, where a troubled history is inscribed in the fabric of the city. A certain air of unreality prevailed in the new residential developments Duncan chronicled in Boom Town and a related series, Trees from Germany. The reality that development could not quite conceal or replace is revealed in a more recent series of work, Bonfires, which has already been exhibited in Belfast and is now showing at the Temple Bar Gallery (accompanied by a fine book).

Duncan was born in Belfast in 1968 and hence grew up during the worst years of the Troubles. Having studied documentary photography at Newport in Wales he went on for further studies to Glasgow. Like many contemporary photographic artists, he works in a considered, analytical way. In his work he has always concentrated on Belfast. He tends not to depict people so much as the spaces they make, shape and inhabit. He has been drawn to slightly anomalous urban spaces, public or semi-public tracts of ground that have an awkwardness about them, and that often feature odd, vaguely disturbing details – something burnt or broken, for example – that raise the anxiety level. There is a sense of not quite being able to read these spaces, and hence being put on your guard: an experience familiar to any city dweller.

With Bonfires the odd objects take centre stage. Rather than recording the festivities, Duncan opts for long, expansive views of pallets and tyres gathered and heaped in preparation for the July 11th celebrations, usually in open spaces in housing estates, or on stretches of urban wasteland. The basic constituents are the same, but a typology of bonfires emerges, from precisely built cylindrical towers to stepped pyramids, to chaotic, conical heaps. Emblems of identity and sectarian antipathy are built into the surrounding environments and, of course, into the structures themselves.

One could take an historical view, presuming a post-hostilities perspective, and see the elaborate, ritualistic preparations and the symbolism involved as the enactment of tradition, the expression of heritage, or just a local version of the licensed madness of carnival.

All of which do apply. But the bonfires are surely also evidence of an enduring social and political reality, of a wound that, despite recent tentative appearances to the contrary, has never healed and, as the tragic events of the past few days have shown, is always on the point of reopening.

In concentrating on the structures and the extraordinary scale of the labour that goes into them, it could be that Duncan is inviting us to draw a parallel between the bonfires and the developments of Boom Town. Several of the bonfire images also suggest the Tower of Babel and a perversely self-destructive mentality. It’s a visually rich body of work that, quietly and methodically, tells us a great deal about Northern Ireland.

ROBERT O’CONNOR, whose Future Projects is showing at the Cross Gallery, is an Irish photographer who also takes contemporary urban development as a subject, though he looks further afield than his own country, in fact to China. Born in Cork, he studied at Belfast, then Cardiff and Carmarthenshire. As with Duncan’s Boom Town, O’Connor is looking at cities in the throes of dramatic development, though in his case the cities are Shanghai and Hangzhou, so that the scale and nature of development is unprecedented. He travelled in China in 2007, when the global economy had not yet registered the calamities to come, and when limitless growth still seemed plausible.

He notes candidly that China overwhelmed him. It was hard to know how to deal with it as a photographer, and it was only when he was sorting through many hundreds of photographs that: “I remembered that my first impression of China was the huge billboards that whizzed past me as I drove along the highway leaving Pudong airport.” The billboards featured not advertisements in the conventional sense but utopian visions of future urban developments, virtual reality renderings of vast residential and business districts, complete with futuristic parks.

By then, developers and estate agents in Ireland had resorted to similar, if more specific means in advertising new developments. Some of their efforts are still around: idealised representations not only of bricks and mortar but of affluent, desirable lifestyles of luxury and consumption. O’Connor’s images explore several fault lines implicit in the gigantic hoardings in China. A cursory glance might convince you that you are looking at an amazing urban vista, but a second glance might reveal a roughly repaired gash in the image.

He is also intrigued by the joins between image and reality. A planting scheme leads us back into the middle distance and onwards, but something is not quite right. The actual landscape gives way to a represented landscape. A luridly coloured panorama of tower blocks extends away from a municipal park, and we realise that both are contrivances. In a way, O’Connor’s photographs are about what remains unseen in them. We are made aware of the slight gaps, the tears and misalignments that indicate a China beyond the images. It’s a thoughtful exhibition that makes one curious about that China beyond and what the rest of O’Connor’s work might say about it.

Future Projects, by Robert O'Connor, based on travels in China. Cross Gallery, 59 Francis St; Until Mar 28