Akihiko Okamura photographed the Vietnam War before arriving in Ireland – and his view of the North’s sectarian violence was uniquely poetic
Tag: The Troubles
“It’s about lesbian alt. culture, it’s about growing up, and having a weird conflicted background – it’s about navigating youth in Northern Ireland,” says the 24-year-old artist, as she presents her first solo show in London
As the country enters an uncertain political and social landscape once more, Peress’ 2,000-page document of Northern Irish life in the 1970s and 80s feels more pertinent than ever
Before becoming a photographer, Sean Hillen was a tinkerer. As a young teenager, one of his favourite pastimes was to take apart his grandfather’s old cameras and then piece them back together again. It wasn’t long before he discovered that with a bit of tweaking he could fix a brand new 120 roll of film into an outmoded 620 camera. “I did that, I got them developed, and I was immediately addicted to photography”.
Hillen grew up through the Troubles in Newry, Northern Ireland, close to the border with the Republic of Ireland. “It was utter chaos,” he says. “I knew people who got killed, and I knew people who killed other people”. Hillen and his four siblings would lie awake in bed at night listening to gun battles, which were so frequent that they were able to distinguish between the sounds of different weapons.
From the dimly-lit back alleys of Belfast, right into the interiors of its inhabitants’ homes, Chad Alexander’s graduation project Entries takes us on a reflective journey through the streets where he grew up. The 27-year-old first picked up a camera after seeing an exhibition that combined scenes of the Northern Ireland conflict with vignettes of daily life; he has since been developing his own take on documentary in this series. “It was work that I had always wanted to make, but until that point I wasn’t exactly sure how to approach it,” he explains.