Burlington rooftop

Courtesy of Orla Mitchell

Motel life

The Personal Made Public:

Just sitting down to a beer and thinking about my expiences with photography. I have been away from the camera for some time now, shooting bits and pieces but not where I want to be in terms of the work I want to be making. I,m in Canada and no excuses will do anymore. What is photography to me, everyone has their own view on the subject but the more I think about it, I think we all see photography in the main stream as the external image we spent to the world of our innermost and everyday experiences of the world around us. When I think about the important images in my life they always tend towards those of the characters i have encountered through my life. The only image I ever really took of my father shortly before he died, the instance of that image to me, as my only personal record of the man. The four years I struggled with mourning for him, the work I tried to make in honor of his life and it's influence opn the man I perceive myself to be today. That image of my father is sad in more ways than once, he doesn't present the image of health or happiness, yet all through my life I regarded my father in terms of his strength and his easy going attitude to life, his laugh, his quietness. He was a man of few words, yet when he would come home from a nights drinking with my mum, he would always wake us up to tell us stories of when he lived in Roscommon with his family, shooting ducks on the way home from the pub, his first drink with his dad; a pint bottle of macardles. Second in the images of my past are the images of the women I have spent my life with, they never age, they stay exactly as I first picture them, they are timeless, the memories may tell a different story, yet the photographs only reveal their beauty and their presence. The photograph is "the girl in the winter garden" , Roland's Barthes mother, is truly what I am trying to describe. The photograph mains outside of time, yet still bears witness to the " this has been" it cannot be disputed. Yes he did exist, yes she was beautiful in her own way. The photographs beauty is that of stillness, the moment remains and the voices have faded. It is the quintessence of the external memory, it is available to us at a moments call, it evokes the moment, it stirs the emotions within us. It is nothing more than the very personal inner experiences contained. Yet the means of unpacking it remaisn within the grasp of the individual. The photograph will always strive to be more than a mere object of memory, yet that is where it's powers lie. In opening the private moment to the public view, yet what is contained within may well remain outside of the publics understanding/empathy.

overlapping landscape at high speed (an adequate amount of headspace)

sometimes the landscape is just the shape of the horizon line. a profile one comes to identify at an instant.. 

for me its the flat open plains, where the sky is as much a part of the whole as the actual landscape itself.. 

looking back through some earlier images i find some examples of trying to relate to this landscape or that.

what i mean here i think is the struggle to make work that is personal, 

but whilst living in a space that is not your own. torn between town and country.

 the following images were shot between dublin and athy: 

 they were shot on a holga traveling at speed, the bus that is not the camera,

 thinking about  the camera was also traveling very fast..

an outsider inside fanore

its hard to see beyond the landscape, its right there, in your face.  you feel obliged to reflect that, its vastness, its isolation. yet i wonder looking and thinking back to the west, how much does the landscape come to define the people of the mind scape of the people. for whom it is an everyday backdrop to their lives?

when i shot these i wanted to distance myself from the view, try to imply a feeling rather than the 'terrible' beauty of the landscape overwhelm our sense's and lead to a idea of understanding. that of a rugged landscape, a hardy people, emotionally isolated from each other.. an outsider looking in and reading what he/she wants to see. 

we all have the landscapes that surround us from where we grew up. how much of these come to define us, or come to define our notion of home, the familiar, the other, the strange the exotic.

G. McManus 

11/04/12