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c106: Winter 2003 - Belfast: John Duncan at Belfast Exposed
C106 review

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.

John Duncan: from Trees from Germany , 2003; courtesy Belfast Exposed

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

Article reproduced from CIRCA 106, Winter 2003, p. 91.

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