The summer issue of Irish Arts Review carries Stephanie McBride’s four-page review of ‘Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography’:
‘Widely divergent in approach and technique, the show and accompanying publication, with perceptive text by Colin Graham, provide a rich and rigorous insight into photography’s power as a repository of cultural memory and as a highly-charged, critical art form that constantly questions its own role in the construction of those memories’.
And there is also a nicely-judged review of the show and book, by Rosie Lavan, at The Oxonian here:
‘In the excellent book which accompanies the exhibition, Colin Graham suggests that, “In photographing Northern Ireland, art photography summons the ghost of publicity […] into every image.” There are certainly images here which seem to prompt recognition of returning ghosts. Sean McKernan’s “Riot (L. Clegg) Falls Road” (1995, above), for example, shows one of the disturbances which broke out in nationalist areas following the early release of Lee Clegg, a British soldier who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of two Catholic teenagers. But what this image tells us most clearly is that a milk lorry must have got caught up in the trouble that day: spilt milk is dashed across the tarmac foreground, and a commonplace four-pint bottle is suspended in the air. The photographs in this exhibition make you work for your interpretations, and together they voice a double imperative: look, and look again.’
Colin Graham 