 |
 |
| You don't know how I feel by Stephen Wilson was at the OMAC Gallery, Belfast, 1998. |
|
| Other articles by John Pringle |
|
|
|
|
| You don't know how I feel |
|
| Stephen Wilson's exhibition at OMAC, in that intimate contained space, brings together photojournalistic images from Armenia, Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Mozambique. A photojournalist himself, he has decontextualised his subject matter (that of the plight of these countries indigenous peoples) completely from even the foreign pages of newspapers by giving it an art gallery context. The photographer is detached from his subject matter, the photographed event from its geographical location, political and social environment and the photograph is detached from all historical context. It is redefined and takes on the premise of art history, its frame of reference shifts axis. This is evident in the peculiarity of the photograph's frames, unrelated as they appear to the images; more akin to a fine art conception than to photographic realism. In some respects the frames deny the prints their immediacy of impact; they induce further detachment like standing in front of a television. Kabul is safely concealed in a box and removed from us. The frames are made of burnt and painted wood, branches mixed with barbed wire and metal. They may have some piquant significance of their own as in a photograph of Bucharest where the alienation of the figures as they move like automatons across the picture communicates something not unlike the feeling of the frame of cold decaying metal. The photographs themselves are intimate portraits of one to four figures, those of individuals in total isolation are in the middle distance or foreground, quite centrally composed in the space around them. Modern ciphers of man's alienation. The frames repel contact on a personal level, they are absurd and seemingly redundant of purpose, a useless artifice; on the other hand they do serve a rather insidious raisen d'etre, that of reinforcing the detachment and unreality of technological communication. |
|
| From the title you would expect the impact on entering the exhibition space to be one of a succession of emotional bonds. What you get is a sense of the disengagement in the subjects that belies the title -you don't know how I feel-. Which of us can say we have stood in the ruins of our own city as in Kabul. The debris that once stood for daily life now lies a wasteland as in the first photograph I saw. |
|
| The only life to break the photographer's rule in his own footnotes of not smiling are the children; natural and spontaneous, or those from northern Kurdistan at least. They are a refreshing counterpoint to the look of haunted memory of their peers in Mozambique. Their plight is to be pitied, if they survive they will become war veterans before they reach their twenties, the victims as well as the perpetrators. The adults are all too aware of a disintegrating culture hanging on to the threads of something close to life. |
|
| John Pringle |
|
