I bought this book and took it with me on a mini road trip around Connemara last week. I really love it. It’s structured in decades from the 1950’s until the 00’s. Each section has an essay with an Irish writer introducing it. I have yet to get around to reading the essays but I like the fact that the Irish have their say, explain Ireland from our perspective if you like. I love the images of Harry Gruyaert. I cannot share them here due to copyright but there is a particular image titles County Kerry 1988 that I real love. It’s an image of a beautiful view, it looks like Dun Quinn but I could be mistaken, there are Islands off the coast. The landscape has many shades of green, its verdant but in a distinctly Irish way – I like that a lot. The sea runs grey to light blue in the back ground and there is a haze in the air, it looks like summer to me. But what I love is the washing hanging on a washing line that sits between us and the background, drying in the sunshine. I love it because it is evidence that people live in this landscape, we, the Irish exist. Everyday life is being lived in all its mundanity. This is challenging the conventional notion of the picturesque in a truly tongue in cheek way.
On a different note there are two images titled Aran Islands 1972 by Hiroji Kubota that I think are mistakenly titled. I doubt these are the Aran Islands, the mountains – there are no mountains on the Aran Islands – are too high. The first image shows a wide expanse of what looks like bog in the foreground that runs off to meet these mountains in the background, wide, open, not a trace of human habitation in sight. There isn’t a square inch of open country on the Aran Islands like this, every piece of land is used for farming and is covered in dry stone walls that snake off into the distance.
A landscape learning log 