Privacy Note: Source uses cookies or similar technologies to analyze trends, administer the website, track users’ movement around the website and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. The technology used to collect information automatically from Source Users may include cookies, web beacons, and embedded scripts. In addition, we and our analytics providers (such as Google), and service providers (such as PayPal and Mailchimp) may use a variety of other technologies that collect similar information for security and fraud detection purposes and we may use third parties to perform these services on our behalf. If you continue to use this site, you agree that we can place these types of cookies on your device. 

Source Magazine: Thinking Through Photography - Blog Posts - Innocent Landscapes Revisited - Background to Innocent Landscapes - Posted by David Farrell: Tue 06 Oct 2009.

INNOCENT LANDSCAPES REVISITED: 06 / OCT / 2009
BACKGROUND TO INNOCENT LANDSCAPES
Posted by David Farrell

Oristown, night, 1999 

Oristown, night, 1999 

In 1999, as part of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, the IRA finally admitted the ‘killing and secret burial’ of ten people from a possible list of fifteen missing people. They released a roll call of locations that were said to be the burial places of nine people from this list. The twist in this inventory of place-names and one of the main factors that drove me on in the project was that all the locations were in the South of Ireland. These people had been exiled in death, somehow uniting North and South in relation to the conflict – a dark stain lurking under the ‘peaceful’ landscapes of the South.That Summer I set out on a short journey from the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan to visit and photograph my first ‘site’ where, three weeks earlier, the remains of Brian McKinney (22) and John McClory (18) had been found. They had disappeared on 25th May 1978 from West Belfast and were thought to have been abducted, murdered, and secretly buried by the IRA. Throughout the history of the recent conflict in Northern Ireland where grief and trauma were visited upon so many people across all communities, these young men were part of a disparate group of people who became known as ‘the disappeared’. Nothing was certain in relation to these people, even their exact number was difficult to ascertain. Virtually all were Northern Irish Catholics and were thought to have been victims of internal IRA ‘policing’ of the movement and the wider catholic community.I followed the searches that were carried out in 1999 and 2000 and the resulting photographs were published in a volume entitled Innocent Landscapes in 2001 as a result of winning the European Publishers Award for Photography. However I couldn’t walk away from this work - for one thing there was the unresolved nature of the searches, as only three remains had been recovered. So, every year, usually towards the end of the Summer I would revisit these locations making photographs of a ‘healing’ landscape. In the back of my mind I had said to myself that I would try to do this for ten years. This blog will outline my intended final visits to these haunted places.

David Farrell was born in Dublin (1961), read Chemistry at UCD graduating with a Ph.D. in 1987. Currently working as a lecturer in photography in IADT-Dun Laoghaire. He has worked independently and on Communion projects with Gogo della Luna (Gudòk). Received the European Publishers Award for Photography in 2001 for Innocent Landscapes and in 2004 participated in the European Eyes on Japan project. Crow, his collaborative multimedia film with composer Benjamin Dwyer, was premiered during the Composers Choice Festival at the National Concert Hall Dublin in 2005. He exhibited at Houston FotoFest 2006 and more recently in Pinyang Festival of Photography in China in 2008. His second publication Nè vicino Nè lontano. A Lugo - (Punctum -Autumn 2007) was a result of a residency project curated by Luca Nostri in Lugo in the North of Italy. David Farrell - Elusive Moments a documentary by Donald Taylor Black (Poolbeg Productions) was premiered at the Cork Film Festival 2008 and was recently broadcast on Irish Television as part of The Look of the Irish series on Irish photography.

David Farrell's personal website ▸

Other articles mentioning David Farrell:

Other articles on photography from the ‘Political’ category ▸