The Troubles 2014: Past is Always Present
I was traveling to Northern Ireland, May 2014, the week Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, was arrested for questioning about the 1972 murder of Jean McConville.* I was on my way to photograph the political murals of ‘the Troubles’ that dot Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods of Belfast and Derry. But with the Adams arrest, a trip that began from historical and aesthetic interests took on a sense of immediacy for me as new murals appeared overnight and older murals were defaced in response to the arrest.
As an outsider and a tourist I cannot presume to understand or judge this long and complicated clash of cultural identities and political aspirations. But I am a political philosopher as well as a photographer so this series of photographs is a commentary as well as a record.
I had medieval three-panel paintings in mind as I organized the space of these images. Some images are explicitly triptychs, others merely by implication. Through the relationship among panels, I represent the role political murals play in divided communities and the tensions they create between past and present. In some images, I intervene in the triptych in order to convey my own impressions of the complexity of the conflict and the fragility of peace in Northern Ireland.
* Gerry Adams – president of Sinn Fein and a major participant in negotiating the Good Friday Peace Agreement – had been implicated in the murder of Jean McConville in taped interviews that were part of an oral history on ‘The Troubles’ conducted by researchers at Boston College. McConville was a single mother of 10 who was kidnapped from her Belfast apartment in 1972 by members of the Provisional IRA and executed. It was rumored, incorrectly, that she had been a British informant. Her body was not recovered until 2003. Her murderers have never been identified. This is one of thousands of tragic episodes in the recent history of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
