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“When Ross first moved to New York, he fell in lo
ve with the steam rising up from the manhole covers in the street, how the headlights of rush hour traffic danced in columns of vapor. Whenever he saw the smoke illuminated by light, he felt that he was living in a movie, he felt the grittiness and the radiance of New York, and he was reminded of his creative purpose. Ross came to New York to live ‘the art life,’ a phrase he borrowed from the filmmaker David Lynch, which he used to describe a life of seeking beauty and wonder, mystery and meaning, freedom and transcendence. Ross found freedom in racing his bike down Flushing Avenue or running across the Manhattan Bridge, bobbing and weaving through the crowds, and feeding off the energy of crowds in general, but Ross remained a director through and through. When he was on his bike, he’d yell at pedestrians, ‘Yo! Watch where you’re going.’ When he was a pedestrian, he’d yell at bikers, ‘Yo! Watch where you’re going.’ Double-parked cars incensed him. They restricted his flight and unfettered access to the city. He found artistic activation in Chelsea galleries, senseless graffiti and peculiar looking people on the subway. He often said ‘New York is a great city to leave’ and ‘It’s so great to be back in New York’ in the same sentence. He frequently proclaimed, ‘I used to live in that neighbourhood before it was cool’. He insisted that 4pm was precisely the right time to head for a swim at Fort Tilden because the dunes would glow in hues of pink and purple and he was reminded of Ireland. Ross’s very favourite New York ritual was having his friends over to his apartment to make food and take photos. When he was taking pictures of me or one of his many friends, he would coax us into position in relation to the sun saying, ‘find the light.’ Find the light. This directive was not just about illuminating our faces, but about illuminating our hearts. Ross wanted us to come into the light to be fully seen in all of our perfect imperfections. Rumi, a Sufi poet that Ross loved, said ‘the wound is the place where the light enters you’. It is only by being vulnerable, open-hearted and broken-hearted that we are able to touch the grace of light. Ross taught us that. And we are so lucky to have borne witness to Ross’s exquisite light. To see the shine in his eyes. The glint in his insight. To hear the brightness of his deep belly laugh. How he glistened when swimming in the sea. Ross was a prism: absorbing light and reflecting it back out to all of us around him. This is how Ross loved us. He brought us into the light. Ross, we hope you have found your light. And we, your friends, will continue to love you by always, always, always finding the light.” – LJ Amsterdam Limbs Ross McDonnell Limbs is a series of photos of improvised prosthetic legs that I was told existed at the Orthopedic Hospital in Jalalabad during one of my trips to Afghanistan. While working at the ICRC hospital in Kabul, one of the staff members (all of whom are amputees) told me about a ‘gallery’ of handmade limbs that villagers had left behind when they came from rural areas to be finally fitted for a proper prosthetic. “They are incredible objects,” he said, “one is even made from an RPG. It was enough to pique my curiosity and arrange a trip to Jalalabad, Nangarhar province. When stripped of their surrounding context, this series tries to break from the jaded depictions of civilian casualties we have become accustomed to seeing from far-flung conflict zones. I sought also to avoid the many visual tropes that have come to define the Afghan people, who, are perhaps largely seen as either suffering women or potential terrorists in the Western discourse. With Limbs, the viewer is presented with the image of a prosthetic leg and invited to imagine the individual who took the time to adapt, construct or improvise their own prostheses. The photographs humanise and personalise a subject that we, perhaps, automatically associate with suffering. For me, the series serves to anthropomorphise the particular resilience and optimism of the Afghan people whom I spent many years documenting. These prosthetics are presented as sculptural objects. The individuals who created these prosthetics rejected – both by necessity (due to an acute scarcity of materials) and through their own creative impulse – what the medical establishment sets as nominal criteria for a prosthetic leg. Seemingly unconcerned with function, cosmesis and comfort; these individuals favoured radical adaptation, combined with a personal sense of expression in the creation of their bodily extensions. The results are both idiosyncratic and poignant. The star-speckled night sky. A fashionable boot. Even the spent casing of a Rocket Propelled Grenade, it seems, were viable materials for the Afghan amputee. I read that experts believe the success of a prosthetic depends 10% on the object and 90% on the patient’s attitude to it. These images are testament to that attitude.” Limbs was first published in the New York Times magazine and shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, the world’s leading prize for photography and sustainability. The theme is Hope and the exhibition with fellow short-listed nominees, including fellow Irish photographer Ivor Prickett, and overall winner Joana Choumali will run at the Gallery of Photography until November 6. rossmcdonnell.com prixpictet.com IN THE FRAME 10 26