CIRCA 111 review

Belfast: Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury at Belfast Exposed

Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury: from Archive: Lisburn Road; courtesy Belfast Exposed

In the film Blowup (1966), the protagonist obsessively scrutinises a seemingly innocuous photograph taken in a public park, one which accidentally captures a crime being committed in the background. The exhibition Archive: Lisburn Road reverses this scenario, and its images of parks, shrubs, shops and housing on the Lisburn Road are already charged with expectation. We scrutinise each image to extract some hidden drama lurking in the corners, but no matter how close we look, all we can uncover are variations of everyday suburban life. The more you look the more your mind tries to grasp at the significance of the smallest detail. This is perhaps the point of the photographs, to highlight what we walk past every day, and to uncover the wider implications of our environment, when viewed as a whole.

The appropriation of nature is a predominant factor in many of the images. Gardens, hedges and fencing in particular act not just as aesthetic features but also as layers around a number of the dwellings, protecting from prying eyes. You get the feeling that the gardens are not leisure areas for the house dwellers but something akin to a moat, creating a safe distance from the outside world. Human presence is minimal in these gardens, and this creates an underlying mood of vigilance, illustrated through the use of lone figures such as that of a traffic warden. Two images shown side by side seem to want the viewer to think that even nature can be twisted into indications of social status. One image is of an overgrown tree that almost obscures a house, with a small hatchback car parked outside. Another image is of a neatly trimmed hedge with an expensive sports car outside.

Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury: from Archive: Lisburn Road; courtesy Belfast Exposed

A large number of the photographs also show the commercial structure of the road, with a number of specialist shops – selling lingerie, shoes. A luxury chocolate shop sells among other things chocolate cigars; again the building has sports cars parked outside it., illustrating the affluent supply and demand of the area. A couple with their backs turned to the camera point to a shop sign that reads ‘Honey Essential Collection’. In the next image two women, one of whom has her eyes blinked closed, seem transfixed and enticed like rabbits caught in car headlights staring at another shop. The window displays of furniture stores encapsulate a ready-made purchasable lifestyle, through recreating mock living rooms. The internal space of the home, hidden behind hedges in the earlier images, is externalised into the commercial world. It becomes what people perceive to be the model version of home, displayed as an aspirational commodity. Another photograph shows an antiques shop crammed with used furniture, the remnants of another domestic age, illustrating a need to constantly buy and reinvent the present. Some of the images show the changes to so-called lifestyle choices within the area. There are two photographs of Bullicks, a long-standing cookware shop before and after it closed down; it closed due to a reluctance to pay the ever-increasing council tax in the locality, as heard on a B.B.C radio Ulster broadcast earlier in 2004.

Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury: from Archive: Lisburn Road; courtesy Belfast Exposed

The exhibition is a document of a middle-class suburb of Belfast, produced during the spring and summer of 2004. It exemplifies a shift from documenting the results of violence within Belfast to delving into the changes in and very nature of urban areas. It highlights how social identities can become subsumed by mundanity and apathy in the face of change. These changes are often overlooked because they take place over an extended period of time, or because we are only affected after the change has taken place. (We go to the post office one morning to find it isn’t there any more. We notice the increase of cul-de-sac dwellings, only when we discover that it is no longer possible to walk through a certain area.) These photographs act as a record of overlooked dynamics within the overall framework of Belfast. The images show how the environment is shaped by the specific tastes and requirements of its residents as much as by town planning.

Ursula Burke and Daniel Jewesbury: from Archive: Lisburn Road; courtesy Belfast Exposed

All of the exhibition’s observations are subtle ones; individually the images are mundane, yet as a set they explore the gradual changes that often go unnoticed till an area’s so-called original character has irreversibly changed. It is not unlike Martin Parr’s book Boring Postcards, which reveals lost aspects of social histories and infrastructure. As the artists state in the accompanying book, “Our prime concern in photographing this small neighbourhood in such detail is to render visible a community that would rather be invisible.”

This invisibility presumably refers to the distance and comfort of the bourgeois area, which seems to have developed immunity to any sort of harm or critical engagement within society. This in itself can be viewed as either righteousness or social commentary. The exhibition is an interesting contribution to the culture of surveillance we have been living with in Belfast for some time -not to mention the general trend elsewhere. It is worthwhile to consider who the audience is for this work, and who is watching the middle class being watched?

John Mathews is an artist living and working in Belfast

Daniel Jewesbury and Ursula Burke: Archive: Lisburn Road, Belfast Exposed, December 2004 - January 2005; accompanying book by same name: edition of 500; £8; ISBN 0-9524217-4-7

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.90–92

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