Source
Summer 2000: Issue 23
English
Edited by John Duncan and Richard West.
Softcover
42 pages
260 x 205 mm
2000
ISSN 13692224
This issue of Source magazine engages primarily with the institution. It looks at the institutions that photographs engage with and often end up in the ownership of such as museums, galleries, archives, courts and broadcasters as well as individuals who collect and sell them. Sean Doran (NI, M) writes on the importance of the photograph to legal cases such as the Bloody Sunday inquiry, Anthony Haughey‘s (NI, M) work features images of the individuals behind CCTV cameras and Mary McIntyre‘s (IE, F) new photography deals with the interiors of institutions. The cover image is by Karl Grimes (IE, M).
Artists and writers featured in this issue include Anthony Haughey (NI, M), Jamie Davis (GB, M), Karl Grimes (IE, M), Mary McIntyre (IE, F), Jennifer L. Grigg (US, F), Justin Carville (IE, M), Siún Hanrahan (IE, F), Nicholas Adams (US, M), Sean Doran (NI, M), Aaron Kelly (NI, M), Niamh Ann Kelly (IE, M), Nicholas Allen (NI, M), Rhonda Tidy (IE, F), Eoghan McTigue (IE, M), Daniel Meadows (GB, M) and John Osman (IE, M).
Editorial
Although we might prefer to believe otherwise there is no getting away from the fact that a lot of photographs end up in institutions. There they are catalogued, put to work and occasionally sold off to whoever can afford them. This issue takes a systematic overview of the different ways a photograph can inhabit an institution.
Photographs can be changed by the institutions that hold them. Jennifer Grigg has been to museums, public galleries and archives to find out how they regard the photographs that come there way (or don’t) and what they do with them. Justin Carville has been to see the RTE archive to find out what use a broadcaster can make of photographs and Siún Hanrahan has been speaking to the Kerlin gallery who sell them. Some of the photographs they sell are reviewed by Niamh Ann Kelly, in this case the Sugimoto exhibition, Architecture Series. One of the people that buys photographs, (though not from the Kerlin) John Osman, has recently exhibited his collection in Fermanagh and this is also reviewed; giving us a contrast perhaps, between the people that sell photographs and the people that like to collect them.
A place where photographs are scrutinised with a particularly unforgiving eye is the courts. Sean Doran explains the limited circumstances under which the legal process would admit photographs as evidence and describes the unusual role of photography in the current Bloody Sunday inquiry which has used digital simulations to assist the search for the truth.
The photographs we publish in this issue also deal obliquely with institutions in one way or another. Karl Grimes has photographed the dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Mary McIntyre’s shows us generic institutional spaces and Jamie Davis has been to Irish clubs in Britain to record these homes from home. We start however with Anthony Haughey’s portraits of people in CCTV offices, the faces, behind ‘Big Brother’.
Meanwhile a restaurant has recently opened in Belfast with a photograph of a caged bird by Paul Seawright from his series The Missing, or as the Belfast Telegraph restaurant critic had it, ‘A huge abstract painting of an old woman and a canary’.
— The Editors
(source: https://www.source.ie/archive/issue23/is23editorial.php)
About the Magazine
Source is a quarterly photography magazine, available in print and as a digital edition, published in Belfast, Northern Ireland. They publish emerging photographic work and engage with the latest in contemporary photography through news, thoughtful features and reviews of the latest exhibitions and books from Ireland and the UK. Their website brings together an archive of writing and pictures from the magazine alongside current features.
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(source: https://www.source.ie/main/about.php)
