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WORDS Tom Lordan the exhibition as a whole so coh
esive. However, they also each touch upon an aspect that I haven’t yet mentioned. Darren Campion, one of the curators of the exhibition, explained that they “wanted artists who had a critical relationship to how Ireland-asplace has traditionally been represented in wider culture. We felt these photographers are using ‘place’ to address questions about Irishness and national identity.” Farrell, O’Connor and Szczutkowska fit neatly into this curatorial framing, offering a nuanced extrapolation of Irishness: in terms of Republican violence; historical agriculture; family-lineage; immigration; poetic imaginaries, etc. On a final note, the exhibition also serves to highlight the role the gallery, which changed its status to a museum in June, has played in supporting the development of major bodies of work by Irish photographic artists. If the calibre of this exhibition is a template for the newly minted museum, the future is bright for photography in Dublin. In Our Own Image: The Politics of Place is on at Photo Museum Ireland until August 27 are accompanied by a text-poem, one of several in the wider collection, that further serves to punctuate time with a series of one-line weather reports, obsessing about the rain: “Heavy rain this week for days./ Weather broken. Thunderstorm with rain./ Started to rain./ Soft rain all day./ Very wet weather./ Unforgivable rain. June 23rd/ Storm weather. Torrential rain…” While O’Connor’s photographic project strikingly depicts her personal experience of her homestead, capturing the luminescent moments in her daily routine on the farm, Izabela Szczutkowska’s treatment of home is far more spectral and disembodied. Her photomontages were inspired by her father: in 2020, the artist wrote that “my father, Zbigniew, never visited me in Ireland as he was afraid of flying. He was very familiar with Ireland, however. As a frequent user of Google Street View, he knew the colour of the front door of the house that I had lived in Dublin.” Intrigued by the idea that technology “allows us to see, at any time, places we have never been to,” Szczutkowska began to experiment with imagery pulled from the web, and fused together features of her Polish and Irish homelands, expressing “an unfulfilled dream and desire for those two places to become one.” Szczutkowska’s work stands out for its formal inventiveness - her practice involves several stages in which she collects, fractures and then unites her imaginary landscapes; taking images from Street View, glueing and layering digital imagery over prints, creating collages, taking photographs of the collages, etc. The distorted surface of the image is made more disorienting by the skewed perspectival dimensions in the image, and heightened again by incorporating several types of image-resolution. There are far more contributors to the show than I can mention here, all of whom present intriguing visions of place using different perspectives and methodologies; Paul Gaffney, for instance, shoots the forest in near-total dark; Bernadette Keating uses off-camera lighting to create bright lines that split her natural studies apart; Martin Seed intensifies the contrast of his black-and-white photography to create a visual metaphor for the polarity of Northern Irish politics, etc. I largely chose to analyse the artworks of Farrell, O’Connor and Szczutkowska because the explicit thematic relationships between their works capture the connections and dissimilarities that make 49