Jim Vaughan: This Time This Place.

I have been working on trying to get my concept down on a piece of paper for assignment 5.  This is my first incarnation:  This assignment will be my personal response to the postcards of Ireland produced by John Hinde in the 1950’s.  John Hinde’s work, in my opinion, uses beautiful landscape photographs  to create a myth of Ireland as a beautiful, primordial society with the aim of selling this country as a tourist destination.  This myth acted as a thin veneer at the time to cover up the reality of mass emigration, poverty, church and state oppression and institutionalized cruelty and sexual abuse.  Photography is still used to perpetuate myths about Ireland today.

I say first because I foresee that it will change.  Already since putting this down yesterday I have begun to think about the two Ireland’s, the real and the imagined.  Do they exist side by side or do they actually meet?  In my opinion they do, the meet all the time.

So another subject I have been thinking about is my method here.  I think at the moment the only way I can proceed is to find a route to follow and begin photographing.  I am planning of following the route parts of the Wild Atlantic Way and photographing what I find.  This afternoon I will head north from where I live in Sligo.  I will be looking for scenes that for one reason or another I react to, that grab my eye for whatever reason.  I don’t want to overthink this so I don’t want to do too much pre-conceptualisation.  I want to make images that also have a visual impact.  I want to use ambiguity, kind of like using rhetorical question marks in each one.  I also want to be aware that this assignment involves thinking about John Hinde’s style.  For instance he makes use of a particular type of sky, particularly a Mediterranean sky in each of his images.  This is not an normal Irish sky.  The normal Irish sky is overcast and cloudy.  A good example of the type of work I want to make is the work of Jim Vaughan; This Time This Place.  His project was made to  “challenge stereotypical ideas about life on an island”  the Island in question is Clare Island.  The pictures are of the everyday details of life on the Island and it is a cooperative project with the islanders.  I love the realness of the style, the pictures are beautiful with any fussy pictorial nonsense – can’t put it any other way.  They are documentary in style but show how beautiful this style actually is and I would say that they are a case of a photographer documenting a place by photographing what is there rather than what he or she thinks should be there.  I notice the everyday -ness of them and there are several different everyday features that crop up again and again.  Cars, telegraph or power lines, roads and more.  One of the things that is noticeable about them is the presence of people, and I mean the fact that you can see their faces and that they are active in the images rather than merely standing around like props in the picture.