Description
Sandy Row 1974
Looking back almost 44 years to the time of my Sandy Row photography brings memories not only of the worst of Belfast’s ‘troubles’ but also of my own struggle to live on a student grant while studying photography at the Art College. My decision to enrol in 1972 at the age of 35 followed the bad year of 1971 in which Short Brothers and Harland paid me off and I spent six months in Foster Green hospital and lost a kidney to Tuberculosis. After this trauma, I resolved to change the direction of my life.
My head of department and lecturer Don Carstairs and Norman Lawrence and Jack Patience, while showing some disapproval, went along with my inclination towards documentary photography, an expression of my socialism. Naively, I believed the world might be put to right by image-making, perhaps in the vein of Lewis Hine and others.
Sorties into the working-class area of the Falls Road in the mid 1960’s became more serious with the violent communal upsurge in 1969. Believing the working people, both Catholic and Protestant to be victims of sectarian politics, I sought to find and show it’s retrograde results on their lives. Shortly after I commenced my studies, I learned of the plan to re-develop Sandy Row. I decided on a project to record the lives of the people before they were ‘re-developed’. A fellow student, Arthur Watson put forward the idea of seeking out such major change projects. We exhibited together at the Arts Council gallery in 1975.
At that show, an elderly female attendant referred to me as ‘William Conor with a camera’.
One day in Boyne Square I was photographing Sandy Row’s midwife, Mrs Elliot, who never slept in bed but downstairs on the sofa, so she was always ready for the knock on the door. She said to me that day, ‘show what the landlords do to us, son’. For me, she personified ‘Ma’ in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Often during my photography in Sandy Row, I felt an echo of my troubles at home, particularly as I had exposed my family to insecurity and even to penury, but I could only blindly continue and hope to surmount the difficulties.
And it was in mid 1974 that I met the young French photographer, Gilles Peress. He took an interest in me and appeared to be an astute observer of character. One day he said, ‘you think too much, just be easy and photograph. And look a bit happier’. The day he said that, I chanced to take the photograph of two old, white coated shopping ladies which is now regarded as one of my strongest images. He was at my shoulder at that very moment. Peress and I never talked politics but I sensed his affinity with my view of the world.
Other photographers to have documented the re-development of other areas of Belfast include Buzz Logan on the Shankill and Frankie Quinn in Short Strand. Together, we have left a legacy of images that reflect life in working-class Belfast before developers and planners changed things forever.
Bill Kirk,
Newtownards,
March 2017.
Can words transcribe the smell, the flavour, the structure of memory? Can words bring back a time long past? Marcel Proust thought so and devoted 7 volumes “in search of lost time” to that attempt. To some level, this book by Bill Kirk also attempts to do the same: to fight the erasure of time, to bring back to life – people, characters, streets, birds, sidewalk, white socks, bonfires, bricks, concrete, clouds, the smell of tobacco, the texture of tweed, the music, sausages, fish and chips, all of this making a texture, a feel of place and time. The place is Sandy Row, a Unionist neighbourhood near Belfast City Centre and the time is 1974, 40 plus years ago, a lifetime: the time to get old, the time to die, the time to have children, the time for those children to have children, the time for many generations of dogs to have come and gone: the big river of life. In that time spent on Sandy Row, I took to walking the streets with Bill, getting drunk at 1 in the afternoon at the Klondyke Bar smoking filterless Woodbines and joyously snapping away. His book is a true evocation of “a time lost” and as such I cherish it, and I would humbly suggest that you cherish it too. – Gilles Peress
