C106
review
Belfast: John Duncan at Belfast Exposed
John Duncan's
photography scrutinises Belfast's changing cityscape.
His previous work, such as Boom Town, watched
the city as the developers moved in after the Peace Process
began, their architects' visions sitting hubristically
on hoardings above the empty spaces they were about to
fill. In Trees from Germany Belfast is still,
in places, shifting through that dubious 'Process'. Elsewhere
sites have been built over, and the apartments and offices
wait, largely depopulated, to become part of the city.
Duncan's sceptical eye wonders whether they ever can.
Trees
from Germany opens with an image of Lanyon Place,
and what became Belfast's new law courts. The building's
foundations point agonisingly skyward and the innards
of the site are open to view, a chaotic underbelly of
what will be transformed into the now standard, glass-fronted
monotony of the city's new architecture. Behind, the Waterfront
building and the Hilton are made to look equally unfinished
as they jostle with cranes and scaffolding for possession
of the skyline.
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John
Duncan: from Trees from Germany,
2003; courtesy
Belfast Exposed
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Like all
Duncan's photography of Belfast, Trees from Germany
maintains a pallid and unromantic sky, until its silvery-grey
intensity is almost a signature of the place. Duncan's
eye deliberately sits between the objective blandness
of a builder's publicity shot and a more profound existence
as the result of a constant flānerie. And Duncan not only
walks the city but patrols it, showing a care and love
for the place which is being lost without ever slipping
into sentimentality or nostalgia.
The trees
of the title are being planted as urban furniture. Initially
they are seen fragile and bare, at repose just before
being installed in newly landscaped and pedestrianised
public spaces. In apartment complexes at Sandy Row and
the Village (two working class, loyalist areas recently
brashly colonised by developers) Duncan moves inside the
protected plazas offered to the apartment dwellers. Here
trees have been planted in large pots or emerge from neatly
shaped gravel as if in melancholy affirmation of the architects'
drawings. The image taken from the roof garden of South
Studios shows a vista which tries to look beyond the rooftops
of the terraced houses - typically for a Duncan view the
chimney pots of the houses just make it into the sight-line,
but the hills above west Belfast are most noticeably interrupted
by the tip of a Union flag and the towering reality of
a July bonfire, constructed from sculptural pallets and
rising improbably into the sky, topped with a UVF flag.
Along Sandy Row a workman rolls out manicured turf as
a frontage to Days Hotel, while across from him a flurry
of flags frames a UFF mural proclaiming: 'You are now
entering Loyalist Sandy Row', a reassuring marker of authenticity
for any cultural tourist in the city. Such stark incongruities
are relatively rare in Duncan's work, which elsewhere
examines the dead ends which new housing, often literally,
leads to. The trees which begin the exhibition gradually
give way to images of vegetation growing, against probability,
in marginal landscapes.
Duncan's
photographs do more than merely record Belfast in its
absorption into the look and landscape of commercialism.
They create a poetic from the sky's grey light, the texture
of old red brick and new red brick, and the dampness of
new concrete. They insist that somewhere, below in the
soil, or under the tarmac, or above in the luminescence
of the cloudy skies, there is a protesting spirit of the
city which refuses to be built over or developed away.
Colin
Graham is Reader in Irish Literature at Queen's University
Belfast and author of Deconstructing Ireland (2001).
John Duncan,
Trees from Germany, Belfast Exposed, Belfast,
September - November 2003
