C104 Review

Letterkenny: Jan Voster

 

Jan Voster: from Caiseal na gCorr, black-and-white photographs; courtesy Letterkenny Arts Centre

The Irish landscape has as a heritage an intimate relationship with its settlers: not the epic scope of American settlers in wagon trains with impossibly distant horizons, but rather the figure alone in a bog, or swinging a scythe, or crouched near to the earth picking potatoes. In a way, this is not even distinctly Irish, but rather a European - an old-world - relationship of settler and soil. This show by the Dutch photographer Jan Voster, and the accompanying catalogue also featuring poems and prose by Irish-language poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh, places one of the most remote Irish landscapes, that of Caiseal na gCorr (Cashelnagor) in North West Donegal, in view of Mount Errigal, firmly in that European tradition. The intimacy of photographer and landscape, the sense of a calm knowledge of the fields, the way that light and shadow moulds the terrain, how cloud formations and clear skies dramatize or make serene a townland, all this creates images redolent of the European tradition of landscape painting. Voster has been photographing Donegal for many years, and in this project Ó Searcaigh introduced him to his own townland. This added a context, and (albeit tiny) cast of characters to the photographer's exquisite black-and-white studies of landscape - bogs, hayfields, corn stacks, ruins, mountain tracks, and the intimate vanishing points of turf-cutting patterns. Voster is a master of black-and-white landscape photography; of the formal relationship of light and texture, one image Maeve's field, featuring three bands of tone and texture as perfect as any landscape photograph I've yet seen; and of the relationship between time, landscape, and photograph, using long exposure times and making the passage of time an added formal element to the work. This whole project was a great achievement.

Declan Sheehan is Director of the Context Gallery, Derry.

Jan Voster, Caiseal na gCorr, Letterkenny Arts Centre, March 2003