All in the Mind?: Photographing the Border

ALL IN THE MIND? PHOTOGRAPHING THE BORDER BILL ROLSTON Every picture, it is said, tells a story. But sometimes the storyteller helps the audience along by guiding the narrative in one direction rather than another, by pointing toward one interpretation of a number of possibilities . When the meaning of the original image is relatively open, the effect of a caption can be startling. As an artist, Willie Doherty often captions his photographs, yet he goes to some pains to stress that his art does not fall into the category of storytelling and narrative: “These photographs owe nothing to the documentary tradition. They do not propose any evidence of truth” (Doherty). What, then, does the text provided by the caption add to his photographs? In recent years, Doherty has focused on film and video installations, but in the North of Ireland he is best known for his seemingly ordinary photographs: a country road, a street at dusk, an abandoned factory. According to one commentator, very little appears to be happening in his photographs. . . . Such representations attempt to convey precisely the quality of the landscape not being what it appears, of not being empty of meaning, asleep, but rather laden with significance. (Ziff, “Photographs” 201) Although Doherty is known for his concern with the politics and the rhetoric of identity in his native Northern Ireland, he rarely includes any human figures in his photographs. How then does he manage to convey his subjects’ sense of themselves—of their identities—when he provides so little means of emotional engagement in his photographs? His art is representational rather than abstract, so that his photographs are not open to endless interpretation. If there is a preferred meaning—one that he as author would prefer us, his audience, to take—it is not immediately obvious. His captions could close down the range of possible meanings of the image drastically, leading us to single preferred meaning. But Doherty’s captions manage to close down the meaning of the image only slightly, leaving it ALL IN THE MIND? PHOTOGRAPHING THE BORDER 245 open still to a number of possible interpretations. The meaning of his photographs is never obvious. In the context of the conflict in the North of Ireland, what could be merely an artistic or philosophical assertion—there are multiple meanings in any image—also becomes a political statement. By leaving the question of interpretation open, Doherty challenges icons that express and reinforce separate identities. Doherty’s imagery—as in his photograph of a burned-out car on a country road—steers the viewer toward a cluster of preferred readings (figure 1). The juxtaposition of the rural setting and the destroyed car is unnerving ; this is no image of pastoral calm. Why was the car burned? Has there been an accident? Was someone involved in burning the car and, if so, why? Although the photograph conveys imprecise, unspecified menace, we need something more. Through his caption, Doherty provides a text informing us that this is a “border incident”—a piece of information that forces us to draw on funds of memory to aid interpretation, even moral judgment, of this menace. We know that Doherty is from the North of Ireland, where violent political conflict has been occurring for more than a quarter century . We know that such violence—hijackings, guerrilla attacks, stakeouts, ALL IN THE MIND? PHOTOGRAPHING THE BORDER 246 figure 1 Border Incident (1994), 49 x 733/5 in. Cibachrome on aluminum. Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. and killings by state forces—happens near contested borders. But we cannot say which of these many possibilities Doherty’s image records. Doherty’s text adds to the menace: the photograph depicts an “incident ,” not an accident. The photographer takes a cluster of preferred meanings and excludes a few, but he provides no punch line: we do not know whose car this was, what happened in the “incident,” or what happened afterward . Suspended in time, the image suggests the sinister and painful, yet its meaning remains open, making moral judgment difficult. If we knew, for example, that the photograph recorded the aftermath of a British Army undercover operation to “take out” IRA activists, then we could...