I took this 10 years ago, when I came home to Northern Ireland. I wasn’t planning on taking photographs of Belfast, but I felt like I needed to. I wanted to respond to the supposed ceasefire. The narrative is that we’re now living in a time of peace. For the more working-class areas, the reality is anything but.
The shot was taken where I grew up, near the Shankill Road, probably 200 yards from a peace line separating Protestant and Catholic communities. The term they use for a peace line now, though, is “interface”. The government wants those walls to come down by 2021, but it’s not going to happen. The communities want them to stay.
I was born in Belfast in 1965, so my whole childhood was characterised by the Troubles. I remember looking out of our landing window and seeing smoke rising from a bomb blast in the city. There was always a pervasive sense of violence, an awareness of limits. We stayed in our own community. We wouldn’t dream of crossing into other territories.
I wanted to capture the idea of division, the way two completely conflicting accounts of our history – from the Troubles to where we are now – can exist side by side. When I saw this mural tucked away on the sort of estate you wouldn’t walk through unless you were from the area, I thought it was perfect.
Each community would read it differently – in almost entirely opposite ways. The loyalist, Protestant side of the wall might look at it and see a British flag refusing to be washed away; the nationalist, Catholic side might focus on the whitewashing, the idea of this flag being replaced by something new.
As a young art student, although I was trying to capture that feeling of division, my work was at first anything but political: just expressions of space. I’d drive out to the countryside and shoot landscapes. It’s strange to look back on it, but it felt important at the time.
As I grew, though, I started to mine my own experiences, finding ways of expressing how ordinary life still went on. I found a diary from when I was 15. It was full of very teenage stuff, sneaking into X-rated movies, and then in the same entry it would talk about a murder round the corner. I’d write about completing a Rubik’s cube at a youth club to impress a girl I fancied. Then it would say: “They buried Bobby Sands today.”
CV
Born: Belfast, 1965.
Studied: Belfast School of Art, West Surrey College of Art.
Influences: Paul Graham and Martin Parr, my tutors.
High point: “Being part of the Venice Biennale in 2003. I represented Wales, strangely.”
Low point: “Returning to Belfast after art school in the late 1980s. I was isolated. There was no photography community.”
Top tip: “Become comfortable with criticism.”
