IN OUR OWN IMAGE, Politics of Place. 25/06/22-28/08/22 Museum of Photography, Dublin.

Teachain a’Watch , Archival Pigment Print, 66cm x 80 cm.

The Politics of Place explores one of the defining obsessions of our national life, the notion of place. For a people so often uprooted and dispossessed, the identification of Irishness with place, with home and the ownership of land, even with the state itself, carries incredible weight. In mapping these contested territories, photographers have participated in a cultural shift that has seen our understanding of place and what it means deeply challenged. Considering how our sense of place, broadly defined, has been transformed, this exhibition addresses the profound changes that have reshaped Irish society over the last four decades, from the decline of the church to the impact of globalisation, through to ongoing crises around housing, migration, and the environment.
In moving away from traditional documentary towards more socially-engaged and inclusive ways of thinking about their medium, Irish photographers have been at the cutting-edge of contemporary trends. This exhibition has been curated to emphasise the diversity of visual and conceptual languages characteristic of recent photographic practice in Ireland. It reveals how photography has helped to interrogate what Irishness is, and also to reimagine what it might look like.
Curatorial Panel:  Lead curator: Darren Campion, Trish Lambe, Brendan Maher,