Padraig Murphy's show at the Gallery of Photography, under the title Anywhere Please! "looks at the practice and effects of tourism," in Co Kerry. It does so by tactfully, even gently, presenting images of the tourist trade in conjunction with images of the ordinary. That is to say, on the one hand there is a reality constructed to satisfy visitors' expectations, and on the other a reality constructed to serve indigenous expectations and there, somewhere in the background, misty and unknowable, is the Kerry landscape itself.
In the smaller upstairs gallery is a related exhibition Imagining Kerry - Why People Photograph. The work here emerges from Murphy's time as artist-in-residence at St Mary's Secondary School in Rathmore in Co Kerry in 1998. During his residency he got the students to document aspects of their own lives and surroundings with cameras. He records that their initial desire to make "proper" photos gave way to an appreciation that the camera can be a powerful medium of personal expression. On the evidence of this show his time there was an outstanding success. The students have put together considered bodies of work, including several eloquent meditations on their surroundings - Jerry Kelliher being a prime example. Family and friends are the other, related areas of preoccupation. It comes across very clearly that many of them feel a strong, multi-layered connection with their rural environment. This is almost surprising - though of course it shouldn't be - because the caricature of rural youth is that they can't wait to get to the city. These images tell a much more complicated story.
In terms of both tourist promotion and national identity, Kerry is one of Ireland's defining landscapes. Rathmore is in the southeast of the county, above the Derrynasaggart Mountains. Needless to say, it is first and foremost a residential centre, a place where people cope with the day to day reality of making a living, of getting on with their lives, but it is also embedded, so to speak, in a landscape that has an iconographic status and is also, in purely objective terms, exceptional. Salient features of Murphy's photographs might apply to a large number of Irish towns and localities. What emerges is, inevitably, a record of the relentless suburbanisation of the Irish rural landscape but, more, Murphy charts the uneasy spaces and environments that we make, the gaps between intention and result, the questions of ownership, the dictates of economic necessity. But it is important to emphasise that he is not at all judgmental, he observes as someone who has returned to live in Kerry, who must negotiate his own space within the landscape and the community, and who clearly appreciates the difficulties of living in an environment that means different things to different people.
The kind of problems that he represents are evident in another context at the Kerlin Gallery, where the Italian Walter Niedermayr is one of five contemporary photographers exhibiting (and while all the work is interesting, his is easily the best). Niedermayr has been photographing the Italian Dolomites since 1992. The Dolomite Mountains are as emblematic a landscape for Italians as the Macgillycuddy's Reeks are for us. Niedermayr's large-scale images document the way the mountains have become a tourist spectacle and a recreational space. The images, and the mountains, are breathtakingly beautiful, but the images are also shocking.
They depict, for example, brightly clad humans strung out along sign-posted walks like so many ants, or the edge of a vertiginous drop comprehensively railed off to accommodate sightseers, who are there in droves, or the massive paraphernalia of the skiing resorts, from vast chalets to giant ski lifts. These human intrusions seem sacrilegious against a setting of such other-worldly beauty. The unmistakable conclusion is that the mountains are radically transformed by this level of activity, and the implied question is whether the mountains you go to see can ever be themselves once you're there. Once humanity arrives in force they cannot be, but there is a difference between sensitive intervention and, say, suburbanisation.
The documentation notes that Neidermayr "refrains from choosing between the myth of the mountain and the reality of the consumer objects they have become." But it's important to remember that while we may have mythologised them, outside of the narrow arena of postmodernist discourse the mountains are not a myth (even if, as geologist Anita Harris mischievously noted once, "There is not a lot of dolomite in the Dolomites. Most of the rock there is marble.") And, like it or not, there is an onus on us to respect the integrity of an exceptional environment.
In a way, Clare Langan's Forty Below at the Green on Red Gallery, puts the issue in context. The film and the still images that make up her show depict an altered, inhospitable world, one perhaps in the grip of an ice age or some other major climactic event. Langan underlines the disruption by distorting her images with the aid of specially made filters. We can see that we are looking at photographic images, but they do not fulfil our expectations of finding an easily legible account of reality in photographs.
Her observer is a shadowy presence who travels through a world that is, in a dreamlike way, variously underwater, frozen or wreathed in mist. She leaves us to interpret it as we like. It may be that we are privy to a dream, or a solipsistic fantasy. But the abiding impression is of a world indifferent to our presence, one in which we are, in the long term, irrelevant. And it is perhaps that realisation that ultimately draws us to exceptional, extreme landscapes, be they in Kerry or northern Italy.
Anywhere Please! and Imagining Kerry are at the Gallery of Photography until May 29th. Contemporary Photography is at the Kerlin Gallery until May 31st. Forty Below is at Green on Red until May 22nd.
