Visual reflections on Irish modernity as timeplace vol. 1

Photo essay series

Mar 25, 2024

How often are the endless reels of photos we consume day-in-day-out actually honest with us?

I want to consider this series an interruption, or antidote, to Fáilte Ireland brochures that make plastic of the place. They promise to sell you some essential piece of Ireland’s soul but render soulless whatever they attempt to convert into commodity. False promises that wreak havoc in their carelessness for what they evoke in the voids coloniality generates — an essential fabric of modernity.

The edgy and obvious thing to do might be to show images of pain and poverty as some kind of juxtaposition to the artificial sanitised sheen and obligatory positivity of tourist laundry lists. Muck to the clean. Maybe that’s an effective strategy in the right setting. This series definitely isn’t that. It’s a complicated alchemy of experience, grief, reconnection, joy, mundanity, spirituality, pain, and re-existence.

Part of the feeling of modernity having absolute power over our lives is how it establishes a sense of being a ‘time out of time’. In other words, it is temporally and spatially decontextualised; a historical present that entombs itself within its own self-referentiality. It structurally depends upon this decontextualisation in order to support its ridiculous and hubristic narratives that it is somehow the planetary-historical point of arrival.

Reflections on any timeplace could have as many variations as there are experiences of it — ie. pretty much endless. These are of course just some of my own reflections that naturally emerge out of the kinds of places I visit (I seek out the edges), my own experiences, my own lenses and frameworks, and my own positionality.

I often wonder about what life was like for different people across different timeplaces as I walk and move and feel through life as the being that I am in the timeplace I am. I think about the temporary nature of all things — a powerful reminder when things feel immovable and permanent.

This is some kind of temporary documentation giving a glimpse into what I see and experience here and now, but I don’t expect it to have cultural legibility across timeplaces, and who knows how long this website will exist anyway!

All of these photos were taken by me in the past few months.

1. Schrödinger’s community