Taking Liberties

I spent the summer of 2004 in Ireland as part of the Writing in Ireland program sponsored by the Padnos International Study Center at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Trinity College in Dublin. Early on in our stay, I’d written down what one of our tour guides, an art historian from the Republic, had said. “In order to know and to understand Irish culture and history, from the premodern to postmodern, one must look at the Tribal, the Familial, the Hierarchical, and the Rural.”

That notion stuck with me. And, in some ways, it guided my search for a deeper understanding of the culture. Yet it wasn’t until several months later, after returning to Michigan and processing hundreds of rolls of film, that I would finally begin to discover what my work there had really been about.

My previous experience doing camera work on bustling urban streets had taught me to trust my intuition and vision. But after six weeks of restlessly walking and photographing the social landscape of Dublin, and taking over 3,000 on 120 and 35mm films, I still wasn’t satisfied with my photos.

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At the time, I wasn’t sure what I was searching for. But I began to get a sense of it toward the end of our stay as I was wandering around in the Liberties district of west Dublin. “The Liberties,” as it is called by Dubliners, derives its name from medieval Dublin, when the area south and west of Christ Church Cathedral (built in A.D. 1038) lay outside the city’s walls. Those living outside the walls were “free” and had “liberty,” or at least a certain amount of freedom from the taxes, the rule of the king, and the city laws. They were also “free” to be attacked by vandals, predators, and invaders.

Figure 1.

The Liberties had traditionally attracted people from the fringes of society—the poor, the criminal, the alcoholic, the mentally ill, along with other kinds of social outcasts. Over time the district had become a destination for the youth culture with its shops, dance clubs, and old pubs alongside trendy bistros and Internet cafes. All proof of how urban renewal—with its inevitable social problems—can infiltrate and even transform an urban landscape. This contemporary mix of past and present intrigued me.

Just as I was about to wrap up the day’s shooting, I inadvertently wandered into a back street that had no pedestrian or oncoming auto traffic to disrupt my attention. Maybe in my subconscious, I was recalling fragments from the art historian’s earlier talk. In any case, I began panning the camera over a wall that contained abstract forms and parts of graffiti tags that seemed visually interesting. But something was still nagging at me. As I was leaving the alleyway there on my left I saw a graffiti-strewn mural that featured three stark cartoon-like television sets. The mural’s authenticity and simplicity literally stopped me in my tracks.

Using a German-made 3.5 E Rolleiflex Twin Lens camera, I took the photo during the first week of August at around 11:30 a.m., under a constantly changing, partly cloudy sky. I made two exposures calculated with a Zone VI Studios-modified Pentax Digital Spot meter, handheld, on Tri-X Professional 320 Film, one at 1/60 and another at 1/125 of a second at f8, with no filter. I later chose the 1/125 at f8 negative because its rich, textured blacks highlighted and intensified the wall inscriptions. The final result was a black-and-white image with some rendering of rough texture and spray-painted lines. Without a closeup lens attachment, the Rolleiflex TLR doesn’t allow one to focus any closer than a distance of about three feet. And so, it was a technical challenge to render everything on the wall mural in sharp focus.

By utilizing the entire design of the wall (and a bit of what was above and below it for scale and depth of field...