Output details

Scrapbook

Scrapbook, is a combination of vernacular photography, newspaper cuttings and artifacts, from the Troubles period in Northern Ireland (1969 – 1980’s), where the personal is mixed with the public, and the private with the collective.

For almost three centuries, scrapbooks or albums became the most assessable and immediate form of diary making. In Ireland this took a particular and idiosyncratic form. From the late 1960’s until the early 1990’s, the turmoil of Northern Ireland was often reflected in these hand-constructed books. Clippings from newspapers, family photos and personal mementos often found their way into highly individual collaged records of daily life. This research investigates a personal approach to diary making in the context of historical record, and subverts conventional forms of media representations through the re-structuring of media narratives against personal experiences. The Scrapbook takes the form, in paper texture, size and format, of an actual scrapbook. Its act of imitation recalls a personalized archiving of experience, – memories are evoked which are so intensely personal as to be obscure and yet the weight of them is felt in the weave of a wider history. Scrapbook is an imagined archive, which seeks to ask whether what it contains (stories, and ways of living and thinking) is truly achievable.

Contextual grounding for this work lies principally in private albums from the Second World War – collections from the Imperial War Museum, London and the Archive Modern Conflict, London. Analysis of vernacular monographs includes Tacita Dean, Floh, (Steidl 2001) and Hans Peter Feldman, DIE TOTEN, (Feldmann Verlag. Dusseldorf, 1998). Autobiographical photography including Bill Burke, Mine Fields. (Nexus Press, 1995), and Boris Mikhailov, Unfinished Dissertation. (Scalo, 1998, underpinned the research.

Scrapbook, was also exhibited at The Photographers Gallery, London, the Cinmatheque Francaise, Paris, and Frankfurter Kunstverein e.V. Frankfurt, Germany.