Paul Seawright's Afghanistan photographs capture a beautiful landscapelaced with death, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic.
In Belfast in the late 1980s, Paul Seawright made a striking and influential series of photographs. They are called the Sectarian Murder series, though he didn't give them that title himself. They were originally inspired by the diaries he kept as a youngster, growing up in the city during The Troubles. Reading back over the diaries, dating from the beginning of the 1970s, he noticed regular references to reports of sectarian killings. He then sought out the sites where the killings had taken place, and the sites where the bodies of the victims were found, and photographed them. He subsequently exhibited the photographs together with brief, factual accounts of what had occurred in each case.
Bodies are likely to be dumped on waste ground or other kinds of anomalous spaces. By their nature, these sort of places are both nondescript and vaguely sinister. Here, they are rendered all the more sinister by our knowledge of what happened in the past. The methodology, involving careful, forensic research, and the images, of deserted spaces with a faintly or perhaps not so faintly ominous quality, are typical Seawright.
They, and his subsequent work, have been influential, prefiguring David Farrell's photographs of sites where those abducted and murdered by the Provisional IRA are buried, for example. But Seawright's influence has extended further afield by virtue of the fact that he went on to run the MA course in photography at Newport in Wales, where he is now Professor and Director of the Centre for Photographic Research - which explains how an artist from Northern Ireland came to represent Wales at this year's Venice Biennale.
Seawright's fascination with a particular kind of urban space, an in-between, nowhere space, is evident in a great deal of his work. He spent a considerable amount of time exploring the huge peripherique in Paris, for example, walking its fringes, a side-lined terrain of cast concrete, weeds and rubbish and, as police patrols explained to him, the sort of place they search for missing persons. Another project brought him to the fringes of Tallaght, where he made photographs of the harsh interface of countryside and suburban housing schemes.
Generally, there's no people in his pictures. But people are usually referred to in terms of their highly charged absence. The crime-scene quality of the Sectarian Murder images is not untypical. In Europe, he made a series of photographs, The Missing, in which he set out to identify the kinds of places people resort to when they "disappear", in the sense of slipping out of social visibility. And on the peripherique he sometimes stumbled on the haunts of homeless or vagrant individuals. A mildly paradoxical feature of his work is its considerable pictorial beauty. Often he produces beautiful images of a reality that is, to all intents and purposes, grim.
With his background and expertise, it was not so surprising that the Art Commissions Committee of London's Imperial War Museum, a revitalised version of the old War Artists Advisory Committee, commissioned him to respond to the war in Afghanistan. He opted to go to Afghanistan under the auspices of Landmine Action and, once there, travelled in the northern part of the country with the HALO Trust, which has been, he notes, "clearing mines and unexploded ordnance in Afghanistan for 13 years," and, in the south, with a UN mine-clearing organisation. This was clearly an important tactical decision. The results can be seen in his exhibition, Hidden, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin.
He has certainly not come up with stereotypical images of Afghanistan. No local colour, none of the conventional views of military paraphernalia, no high drama. Rather we see incredibly vast expanses of blank, bleached landscapes, endless plains of parched mud and gravel, distant mountain ranges. There is scarcely a sign of vegetation. In one image, camels are dispersed across the landscape in the distance, but otherwise hardly a living thing appears.
Yet, as Mark Durden points out in his catalogue essay, these all but featureless expanses are direct counterparts of the Sectarian Murder photographs. As with those images of ordinary Belfast places, these bleak and beautiful landscapes are unmistakably laced with the unmistakable. They harbour the threat of injury or death from landmines and unexploded ordnance, including an indefinite number of lethal bomblets from US cluster bombs dropped during the war. This empty landscape is nothing less than the most heavily mined terrain in the world.
Mounds of mud dotted regularly across a plain are evidence of landmine clearance, as are brightly painted stones perched atop exposed mines, sprouting like poisonous mushrooms. One sequence of images records the rooms of a Taliban barracks, each one scarred in an identical pattern by shell or grenade and, a surreal touch this, each neatly ticked off with a painted sign. One photograph, of shells scattered across a muddy declivity, explicitly recalls Roger Fenton's famous study of the aftermath of the Charge of the Light Brigade: a desolate, empty valley littered with cannonballs.
Characteristically for Seawright, there is a paradox between the extreme but definite beauty of the arid landscape and the knowledge that it is blighted. There is also an abiding sense of distance. This has to do with the fact that the photographer is obviously an outsider in Afghanistan, one likely to harbour ambivalent feelings about his presence there. But it also has to do with Seawright's habitual practice of remaining at one remove. He is drawn to the aftermath, to the sometimes invisible evidence of what has already happened. Durden quotes him from the catalogue of his own earlier exhibition of The Missing: "I have always been fascinated by the invisible, the unseen, the subject that doesn't present itself easily to the camera."
Paul Seawright: Hidden is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until November 30th. Telephone: 01-6129900. www.modernart.ie