This work is made up of images from when Chris Steele-Perkins first went to Belfast in 1978 as part of a project looking at inner city poverty in the UK. He stayed at a Catholic West Belfast housing development and covered that community, and also made more familiar images of the Troubles.
In 2008, 10 years after the Good Friday Agreement, he went back to Northern Ireland on assignment for The Times, tracked down people he had met 30 years ago, and photographed and interviewed them.
This is what makes the book very interesting for me: the passage of time, what has happened to the people since then and what they thought looking back over 30 years. The interviews were quite eye-opening: many just wanted peace and to get on with their lives. One of the interviewees said "We were always taught by my mother that it was someone else's son - not to hate, and not to judge." It wasn’t a sentiment I had expected.
Northern Ireland had always been like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle for me, of which I had only 30 mostly unconnected pieces. Pieces that had pushed themselves onto my consciousness as news headlines of yet another violent action. This book didn’t give me the connecting pieces but it led me to read more about Northern Ireland and now I am at least more familiar with its history.
Since 2008, Brexit happened and has caused a rise in tension over, among other things, the sea border. I would not have known this had it not been for the Instagram account of @andrewj.98 , who provides an on the ground and current view of these tensions.
This book does not give you the big picture of Northern Ireland, and it does not claim to: it is a personal view and experience of Belfast during and after the Troubles. As Steele-Perkins himself writes in the Introduction, he was "not there to illustrate a thesis, but to enter into the unknown, interacting and responding, and attempting to remain honest."
Look at it as one or two more pieces of the jigsaw.
PS:
After I posted this to my Instagram account, Chris Steele-Perkins made a comment to the post, reproduced below verbatim.
“Thanks Kyun for your thoughts. It is worth mentioning that I commissioned a text for the book about growing up in West (republican) more or less, Belfast, by Paul McCorry, a friend of mine. The text is atmospheric and anecdotal, rather than Analytical. Also, I was not in Derry at the time of Bloody Sunday, but by a strange coincidence I was witness to the Milltown Cemetery Attack.”
Book details
Titel: The Troubles
Photographer: Chris Steele-Perkins
Publisher: Bluecoat Press
ISBN 9781908457653
Hardback
B/W and colour 270 x 290mm landscape + 144pp
You can purchase the book at Bluecoat Press.
Non-fiction Novel on Northern Ireland
If you are interested in reading more about Northern Ireland, I can recommend this non-fiction novel by Ian Cobain called Anatomy Of A Killing. It is the story of the killing of an off duty policeman by the IRA but it also weaves in the key events of Northern Ireland and the Troubles around that story.
You can find the book on Amazon here. Or at any of your favourite bookstores.
