Photographer: Gareth McConnell 'No Surrender'
These portraits, taken over the Easter Period of 1999, were situated in a Loyalist Bar in my home town of Carrickfergus. It was a place I had only ever glimpsed into as a teenager - through a cracked door or through the security bars of the adjoining off sales. I wanted to create a set of images of the loyalist community which did not adhere to the strict media guidelines of bowler hatted men, apprentice boys, Drumcree rioters and super star terrorists posed against backdrops of Shankill Road murals. I wanted to make photographs with all the dignity and poise of old masters and not to revel in the slogans and iconography so closely associated with the protestant people.
Photographer: Chris Shaw 'Life as a Night Porter'
The thing I like most about the pictures is the large element of what I call the chance meeting, the times I was so tired I lost the artifice and techniques of photography. I just took photographs to keep me awake. It became artless. The people I photographed, these episodes in the social fantastic would heighten and illuminate my whole night, often making a difficult job and my twelve-hour shift bearable. The sum of the book is really a hotel of my own imagination constructed from several hotels I have worked in and some Ive stayed in as a paying guest. In reality these hotels bear little or no resemblance to my actual pictures. It just depends on how you look at things. In my experience heaven and hell are places right here on earth, and you can stay in either one.
Lecture Notes
- Colour Photography
- Eggleston
- Szarkowski had seen work previously but did not think the public was ready
- Stephen Shore - personal statement - early colour photos
- Helen Levitt
- Mitch Epstein
- Light gallery in NY in early 70s
- Joel Sternfeld
- Shore did 'Tall in Texas' as postcards - saturated
- Levitt - gritty urbaness - elements of colour highlights debris in the streets
- Meyerowitz - snapshot aesthetic
- What they were interested in - personal statement
- Sonneman
- Slavin - used colour to differentiate personalities
- Commercial aesthetic? Photographed individual groups
- Krims - conceptual, polaroid transfers
- They all informed how we see colour today
- Groover
- Divola - colour spectrum, getting it real
- Sternfeld uses more narrative - shots appear set up
- Jeff Wall
- The word 'colour' was dropped in 1984
- Nan Goldin - Ballad - in 1986 the word 'photography' was dropped
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