A Brief History of Nakedness

Wearing nothing is divine.
Naked is a state of mind.
I take things off to clear my head,
to say the things I haven't said...
Dolly Parton, Naked Eye

Being naked is an ambiguous experience for most of us. The land of the birthday suit borders the states of humiliation and hippy freedom. One way to degrade a person is to have them stripped naked in public, to expose them as a fragile, shivering creature before the forces of power and violence. On the other hand, trip along to see the musical, Hair, and the constraints of clothing are cast aside. The audience are invited to enter into some prelapsarian world of dancing, singing and jiggling genitals. Let the sunshine in which is all well and good if you have the body of a twenty year old rather than bums, boobs, moobs and midriffs that are all crawling south.

Philip Carr-Gomm's book, A Brief History of Nakedness, argues for the supposed liberating qualities of getting naked. He is a tour guide to the joys of living in the buff. Although Carr-Gomm recognises that nakedness can be an instrument of torture and cause public or moral offense, his real interest is in cataloguing the many and varied "positive" expressions of nakedness. For him, nakedness is the key to spiritual renewal and a political weapon that has the power to disable all strains of of despotism. His case for nakedness is comprehensive and lively but, also, never more than skin deep.

Carr-Gomm quotes John Berger's subtly drawn distinction between nakedness and nudity: "To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others and yet not recognised for oneself. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress." Yet, Carr-Gomm ignores this nuance and prefers to use the terms "nakedness" and "nudity" interchangeably. This failure to approach his subject matter from more oblique angles blunts the sharpness of his analysis. Or again, there is no consideration of the importance of clothes in human lives as a distinguishing feature of our evolutionary status or as a metaphor. After all, nakedness is only of interest because most of us wear clothes most of the time. And there is almost no mention of the ubiquity of pornography and the increasing interest in burlesque. Extolling the virtues of nakedness, Carr-Gomm turns a blind eye to the exploitative aspects of the naked state.

Nevertheless, there remains much to recommend this book. A Brief History of Nakedness fizzes with interesting facts and ideas, many of which I had never come across. In the section on religion, Carr-Gomm observes that early Judaic baptismal rituals would have involved the full immersion into a river or mikvah (stone pool) of a stripped person. Christ, it is believed, would have been naked when he was baptised by John the Baptist in the river Jordan. A fact that is attested to by early Christian iconography, such as The Baptism of Christ image in the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. As Christianity developed its own baptismal rites, the nakedness of catechumens remained an arresting visual symbol in the ritual. Thus, St Cyril of Jerusalem in c. 350 AD, addressed these men and women with the words, "You are now stripped and naked, in this also imitating Christ despoiled of His garments on His Cross, He who by His nakedness despoiled the principalities and powers, and fearlessly triumphed over them on the Cross."



The link St Cyril makes between the nakedness involved in baptism and the nakedness of the crucified Christ is one that would be picked up by later thinkers and artists. The crucifix pictured above is attributed to Michelangelo and originally hung behind an altar in the Santo Spirito Hospital, Florence. A reminder to the patients that through their humiliations and physical trials they were conformed more intimately to the suffering Christ. Nudus nudum Iesum Sequi, "Naked, I follow the naked Jesus", as St Jerome put it. It seems, however, that prudery took precedence over such spiritual considerations and the crucifix was removed and hidden. Having been rediscovered it was, first of all, housed in the Buonarotti museum. In 2000 it was returned to its original Augustinian owners who hung it in the Basilica of Santo Spirito where it is an image of popular devotion as well as cultural interest.

Interestingly, in secular thought, nakedness and "spirituality" are often associated. "When I free my body from its clothes, from all their buttons, belts, and laces," wrote the playwright, August Strindberg, "It seems to me that my soul takes a deeper, freer breath." The intuition that nakedness reveals a truer, interior dimension to a person is not just the reserve of members of naturist camping sites or nudist beaches. This idea exerts a significant influence on popular culture, especially via the self-improvement industry.

In the How to Look Good Naked television series, a person (usually, a woman) who is not emotionally comfortable in their own skin is forced to confront their nakedness and, guided by the benign "go, sister" camp of the presenter, come to an appreciation of their "inner beauty". In this way, they achieve some sort of body acceptance and karma. Nakedness, then, opens up new channels of self-understanding and healing. All this may be playful marketing, but it does suggest that human beings have an instinctive understanding that "the self" has a unique relationship to the body. It is through the visible reality of our bodies that we intuit the existence of invisible realities which, in a secular context, many describe as "spiritual".

A Brief History of Nakedness is a thought-provoking survey of the fleshiness of human life. It is also a beautifully produced book with excellent illustrations that have been carefully chosen to illuminate ideas rather than provide puerile titillation. Sadly, Carr-Gomm is overwhelmed by the number of examples of naked flesh, from Calendar Girls to The Romans in Britain, streakers to Superbowl costume malfunctions, naked protests to Abu Ghraib, Yogis to St Francis of Assisi. Without a stable philosophical position, Carr-Gomm cannot control his references and as a consequence, his argument struggles to find coherence. Unfortunately, by the final chapters, his full frontal approach to his subject matter begins to feel more than a little like the Emperor's new clothes.

A Brief History of Nakedness, Philip Carr-Gomm, Reaktion Books, 2010

The Karate Kid

If you want a popcorn movie with cod Confucian philosophy thrown in, then The Karate Kid is for you. The original 1984 version passed me by and I would not have gone to see this remake if it had not been for the persuasive powers of my six year old nephew. I'm glad I did - for a bit of a lump-in-the-throat-kick-ass action on a wet day in London this did it for me. Admittedly, the screenplay could have been written on the back of a pack of Marlboro Lites. A widowed mother and her son, Dre Parker, move to Beijing because of her job. Dre is smitten by an English speaking Chinese girl who plays Bach violin solos. Unfortunately, Dre is bullied by a gang of thugs who are trained in the shadow side of kung fu by a brutal dojo whose motto is "No Fear! No Pain! No Mercy!". But, in the flats where Dre lives works a maintenance man, Mr Han, who just happens to be a kung fu master. And, well, the rest is a lot of jumping around, gurning and fake pearls of oriental wisdom, such as, "stillness is not the same as doing nothing" and "Life will knock us down, but we can choose whether or not to stand back up."

Yet, it works because Jackie Chan as Mr Han crafts a neat little performance with flashes of real emotional intelligence. Chan is not afraid to portray this kung fu master with a middle aged spread and as bruised, not only by kung fu opponents, but by a life of bereavement. Dre becomes his surrogate son and unlike the kinetic action sequences, the development of this relationship is given the time to resonate at a deeper level. Jaden Smith (the son of the actor Will Smith, who is also one of the film's producers) turns in a performance that is 50% cool and 50% balsa wood. Like father, like son.

I enjoyed the gratuitous tourist shots of China: the Great Wall of China, the Olympic Birds Nest Stadium, etc which will have had employees of the Chinese Tourist Board rubbing their hands. I enjoyed the schmaltz, the spirituality and the puppy love romance. It's not Kill Bill, but I did flinch at the kung fu bullying inflicted on Dre (my nephew didn't bat an eyelid) and whooped (well, internally) with the rest of the audience when the baddies were defeated by the forces of virtue. Yes, the moral of this tale is that friendship, discipline and mercy make for the good life...but it helps if you can give your enemy a good kicking at the same time. So not quite the Nicomachean Ethics, but certainly a little more fun.

Gainsbourg

At last a film that gives hope to ugly johnnys everywhere, those for whom the words "buffed" and "chiseled" could only refer to their hapless experiments in d-i-y. Thanks to Joann Safar's film Gainsbourg, these men can believe that they have the power to attract the most beautiful women in the world. After all, if the dweeby Serge Gainsbourg with his beak nose and elephantine ears could date, among many others, the ravishing Brigitte Bardot and the gamine beauty, Jane Birkin, then there is hope for all the aesthetically challenged. Serge Gainsbourg proved that it is not a six pack that is the way to a woman's heart, but a single pack of Gauloises cigarettes and a nicotine stained voice singing Je t'aime...moi non plus.

Safar's film is not a conventional biopic. Using animation, puppetry and an array of narrative devices, he builds an impressionistic sketch of Gainsbourg. In tone the film is closer to Todd Haynes's meditation on the life of Bob Dylan in I'm Not There (2007) than, for example, James Mangold's Oscar winning, Walk the Line, which provided a chronologically driven telling of the life of Johnny Cash. In a recent interview, Safar admitted:

Serge Gainsbourg created a character for himself. I don't want to go around delving into his personal life to discover who he really was. I couldn't care less about the truth. I love Gainsbourg too much to bring him back to the realms of reality...I want to make a cult film, not a journalistic account of his life.

I tell stories through images, so my film is very visual. It is full of lies, because I love lies. This is how I go about creating a modest and self-conscious work: lying, always lying. I always do a great deal of documentary research beforehand and then purposefully forget half of what I learned. Then I take my subject and make him into a legendary hero...I believe that Gainsbourg is more heroic than Superman, in the sense that the Greeks understood it, because a hero is someone who suffers and gets knocked down, but will still grab burning coals with his hands.

I'm not sure how seriously one can takes such comments, especially when Safar's film so closely follows the narrative arc of Gainsbourg's life. We see the Russian/Jewish Gainsbourg's youthful contempt for the anti-semitism of Nazi-occupied France and his creative longings to be a painter. By all accounts, this does not deviate from the biographical details of Gainsbourg's early life. But Safar takes these basic facts and creates a fictional scene (as far as I am aware) of emotional intensity. To earn some money, the adult Gainsbourg is forced into giving a music lesson at a school for orphans who have lost their parents in the Nazi death camps. As his reservations evaporate before the class, he begins to dance wildly and Gainsbourg the performer is revealed. The children burst into spontaneous applause. Beaming, Gainsbourg is grasped by his vocation.



The vocation was music. The film captures the eclectic range of musical genres that inspired Gainsbourg. From French chanson through teeny bop pop to reggae, Gainsbourg's music was always shapeshifting and provocative. With lyrics that combined poetry, scatology and agitprop, Gainsbourg seemed to capture the prevailing mood of the 1960's. All polite social conventions and moralities were exploded on stage. Yet, ultimately, the real casualty of this performance was himself and Safar does not shy away from the destructive aspects of Gainsbourg's personality. The alcoholism, broken relationships, cheap publicity stunts and sleazy film appearances were all desperate attempts by Gainsbourg to keep his myth alive. The myth lived, but something of the man perished. In a seedy nightclub near the end of the film, Gainsbourg picks up a beautiful, drunk young girl. "I want someone to save me," she says to him. "That's life...," he replies, a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. This exchange may be the fantastical invention of Joann Safar, the lies he admires and wants to propogate, but it also speaks in an authentic way of that universal ache within all human beings for redemption. And that is an important truth.

Toy Story 3

Films are complex creatures, visual chimeras. The urge to tell a story in celluloid (or digital) form sets in motion an achingly slow gestation period, more often than not resulting in the trauma of miscarriage or abortion. Years of pitches and rewrites and accountants and budgets and hawking trailers round distributors. They are the result of a multiplicity of technical disciplines and imaginative flashes made against all the odds. Here is the Hollywood film producer, Art Linson, reflecting on the bitter sweet experience of movie making in his autobiography A Pound of Flesh:

...as you read this, there are busloads of new people arriving (in Hollywood), bubbling with movie ideas, sated with mediocre film school educations, punished by years of watching MTV, just waiting to rape, pillage and taunt an industry that is already burdened by taking itself way too seriously.

Nevertheless, with a little luck there can be a bright side to all this producing stuff. As you boldly weave through the Hollywood roadblocks, building relationships and learning the talk, you may stir up some surprising results. In a town where cynicism is a breakfast food and competition is severe, you just may make a difference. You just may be the one...the one to bring something rare and noteworthy to the screen

The fact that any film comes to light in the dark of a cinema is incredible. The director, John Huston, famously quipped of making his film The Bible, " I don't know how God managed, but I'm having a terrible time." Thus, for a director to create a single film of consequence is a huge artistic achievement. To create a series of films that holds the imagination of the public without sacrificing quality or integrity is to approach a cinematic nirvana.

Even the most celebrated film franchises tend to lose their artistic mojo the longer they go on. Coppola's The Godfather trilogy is an example of this. Yet every film in the Toy Story series has been lavished with the praise of cinema aficionados and lost nothing of its popular appeal. This has been particularly true of Toy Story 3. For example, my fellow priest blogger, Stephen Wang, recently posted an evangelical review of the film on his eclectic blog, Bridges and Tangents. It is worth reading for his infectious enthusiasm. Disney/Pixar, the makers of Toy Story, are presently surfing a tsunami of critical acclaim.



Therefore, my muted response and reservations about Toy Story 3 feel like heresy. There are many things to admire in this film, but few things to really love. I admired the technical ingenuity and the occasional moments of visual beauty, but for most of the film I felt I was being manipulated emotionally, that I was becoming the toy and that the director, Lee Unkrich and his team were pulling my strings. My heart strings were plucked but in such a heavy handed way that they were never going to sing. For example, when Woody, Buzz and co. face their mortality with a new solidarity I believed the film was edging towards a new emotional depth. But my belief was ill-founded. It appears that "too much reality is hard to bear" in the world of animation and a cheap deus ex machina trick lifted the film clear from exploring more adult ideas around the meaning of death. Toy Story 3 possesses none of the poignancy or refinement of Disney/Pixar's 2009 Up with its honest consideration of death, loneliness and the slow bleed of loss.

The introduction of a new character, a teddy gone bad called Lotso offered an opportunity to explore the shadow side of the cuddly toy industry. Lotso is Darth Vader in pink fur, "a Care Bear gone over to the dark side" as the film critic, Jonathan Romney, puts it. Yet Lotso's psychological back story is treated in too perfunctory a manner to make his evil nature credible. He is reduced to a pantomime villain with his inevitable comeuppance hurtling down the highway. That Lotso is not psychologically persuasive may not matter to my six year old nephew, but it should cross the minds of adults who make exaggerated claims for the film.

In the final analysis, the problem with Toy Story 3 is the toys. In 1995, when they were first introduced to the public in Toy Story, they were fun and exciting. Everybody wanted to play with Buzz, Woody, Rex and Mr and Mrs Potato Head. I thought these toys were real characters who would develop their own unique character traits with time. But they didn't. They have remained psychologically static. Their emotions are plastic, their responses to the world they experience, wooden. They have become a huge disappointment. Their batteries have run out and I, for one (and, I think, I am the only one!), have become bored of them.

Toy Story 3 is being promoted as the film that will make you cry this summer. My survey of friends suggest that tears are raining into buckets of popcorn throughout the land. I didn't cry. But, I did want to weep for a film that, if it had been more daring, could have taken audiences to an artistic infinity and beyond. But, hey, that's film making for you!

To blog or not to blog?

For a number of reasons, I'm having to press the "pause" button on The Invisible Province. I don't think this is a bad thing as I've been blogging now for about six months and it is time to take stock. I have enjoyed the experience as it has forced me to look and think about things a bit more deeply. It's also been an opportunity to try and articulate my ideas. But, of course, a blog is primarily for others and to stimulate their ideas...I'm not so sure how successful this blog has been at doing that. But, thank you to all those who have read my posts during these past months.

So, maybe you have comments - positive or negative - about The Invisible Province. Please feel free to share them. I'm sure they will help me to decide whether to press "play" or "stop" in the future.

The Killer Inside Me

Jim Thompson, the author of the 1952 crime thriller, The Killer Inside Me, was described as America's "dime-store Dostoevsky." Michael Winterbottom's new film adaptation has Dostoevsky stamped all over it. The British auteur references the film noir genre, the familiar landscapes of cops and broads moving in Hopperesque interiors. However, Winterbottom's real interest is in the moral void at the core of this world. From the outset, we are trapped inside the mind of the fictional sociopath, Lou Ford. He is a Texan Raskolnikov. The events we witness are interpreted from his point of view. He provides the narrative voice that rationalises his violence. As events unfold, it becomes apparent that his perspective is psychologically warped and wholly unreliable.

Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford as a clean shaven, clean living deputy sheriff. Tipping his stetson, he greets those around him with an hypnotic Southern drawl. He is the man that every young woman dreams of bringing home to their parents. "I've known you since you was knee-high to a grasshopper," says Sherrif Bob Maples, "and you ain't done anything wrong." However, Lou's seductive persona masks pathological tendencies that he cannot repress. When he tries to persuade a local prostitute, Joyce Lakeland played by Jessica Alba, to leave town, she reacts by assaulting him. This violence triggers a disproportionate physical response which erupts in his whipping her raw with his belt. The film follows the sadistic chain reaction as leather is replaced by fists, fists by boots and finally, boots by a blade.

To add to the moral confusion, Lou and Joyce become lovers. She accepts the beatings and disturbingly, takes a masochistic pleasure in them. Joyce mistakes physical abuse and libidinous sex for love. Meanwhile, Lou's fiancee, a schoolteacher called Amy Stanton, accepts the lies and empty promises that Lou spins her. She knows that he is having an affair but even this knowledge is not enough for her to break from the vicious relationship with Lou. Yet, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson never turn these women into passive victims but expose their feisty and perceptive natures. At the same time, they skillfully capture Joyce and Amy's helplessness before the spiritual black hole in the man they love. They cannot escape his gravitational pull.

Casey Affleck's dead eyed, opaque performance is one of quiet intelligence. He does not offer a stock psycho creep, a Norman Bates pastiche. Instead, Affleck uses a rich emotional palate to create his psychopath. Lou's actions are monstrous but he is never reduced to a monster. He is always human, always identifiable as one of us and that makes him all the more chilling. After almost beating Joyce to death, Lou is jolted by regret and sobs "I'm sorry, I'm real sorry - I love you - goodbye." But authentic remorse, Affleck shows, remains outside Lou's psychic makeup. In an act of self-mutilation, Lou has removed from within himself anything that might be recognised as compassion, empathy or love. Ultimately, this is his most evil act, the one that destroys the truth of himself. Lou's sadism appals, but Affleck succeeds in ensuring that the primary response to this evil is not moral outrage, but pity. In Affleck's hands, Lou becomes a pitiful creature.

Winterbottom uses flashbacks to illustrate the supposed roots of Lou's psychosis. Although, it is not clear if this is an imaginary back story concocted by Lou as a psychological explanation for his behaviour. In his mind the distinctions between truth and deceit, reality and fantasy, good and evil have collapsed. Winterbottom challenges the viewer to uphold these moral distinctions or like Lou, to reject the idea that there is a moral order. If we choose the latter, Winterbottom suggests, then it is possible that the killer could exist in all of us.

Audiences have long become accustomed to the ironic violence of Quentin Tarantino and the grand guignol of torture porn. But when The Killer Inside Me was shown at film festivals, such as Sundance, there were protests about the gratuitous violence directed against the film's female characters. The film certainly includes some of the most graphic scenes of domestic abuse and cruelty. Winterbottom assaults a largely desensitized audience with images so brutal that we are awakened to the reality of violence. But, here lies the problem. The hyper-realism of the violence dominates everything else in the film. After a scene of forensically observed sadism, an audience is left reeling and incapable of engaging with character or narrative. Winterbottom cannot integrate the violence and in the end, this failure sucker punches his work.

Castles of Ulster: the photos of Jonathan Olley

During the 1970's, most of my childhood holidays were spent in the Republic of Ireland. My late uncle Patrick would drive to Belfast to meet my family. Driving westwards to Letterkenny in County Donegal, we would pass through Belfast and Derry on the way to the border. This was the height of "the Troubles" but those two words didn't mean much to me. I think I knew that there were "Catholics" and "Protestants" and that I was a Catholic but that would have been the extent of my sectarian awareness at the age of seven or eight. In my innocence, this little Catholic boy particularly looked forward to passing through those city areas where the pavement skirting was painted red, white and blue as if for a party.

A car with a Republic of Ireland number plate must have been an automatic cause for suspicion and, at checkpoints, we would be pulled over by the constabulary. Rolling down the car window, my uncle would hand over his driving licence to some officer whose shoulders and head were cropped by the frame of the window. The licence would be casually examined, handed back through the window and we would be waved on. On one occasion, I remember uncle Patrick was asked to open the boot of the car. As he made to get out, I felt an involuntary spasm of anxiety. But my most vivid memory, sitting in the back of the car, was the sight of an automatic weapon, held snug against an officer's hip with a meaty hand. The sten-gun looked so heavy and serious, so unlike the plastic guns that I had played with. But there was no playtime in Ulster in the 1970's. "Next to the fresh grave of my beloved grandmother," wrote Paul Durcan in his poem Ireland 1972, "The grave of my firstlove murdered by my brother." Yet little boys on their holidays knew nothing of such internecine realities.

What I had become familiar with on these car journeys were the police stations and barracks that we passed. Of course, I had no idea at the time what function these buildings served but I sensed that their purpose could only be sinister. A building that had to protected by a carapace of wire mesh and razor wire was no ordinary domicile. I had never seen anything like these buildings before. With their tiaras of radio masts and satellite dish jewellery, they were other worldly creations set in the "terrible beauty" of Northern Ireland.

It was these buildings, their presence ideologically transgressing the landscape and streets, that the photographer, Jonathan Olley, took a professional interest in. His work is a conscious move away from photo-journalism, the recording of an historical event as a documentary imperative, to a more contemplative consideration of subject matter. Images are used in a metaphorical manner, where an immediate narrative is eschewed in favour of the slow release of ideas and associations. In this way, no ideological positions are imposed on the work, but images are allowed to give up their meaning. This aesthetic stance raises Olley's work above the kitsch where emotions are faked and the photograph becomes no more than a circus of technical effects. His preoccupation is not with concept, propaganda or novelty but with something more nuanced and complex: the truth of what he sees.

The Castles of Ulster photographs find their truth in an historical continuity with the past, thus the collection's title. In an essay, Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same, the architectural historian, David Brett, argues that Jonathan Olley's photographs "bring out the primeval conditions under which such structures are built, and how they are compelled, by hideous necessity, to follow certain rules, which were laid down hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago...rules of brutish utility."

Brett traces the evolution of these buildings beginning with Norman motes and baileys. These were enclosed camps that could man a platoon and withstand the attack of slung boulders or flaming faggots. "The mote and bailey reached Ulster with John de Courcy and has never quite left, " writes Brett, "De Courcy and his successors quartered the countryside with a network of connecting motes." With time, these morphed into castles, those architectural statements of power and resistance written in stone. During the Troubles, the bastard children of mote, bailey and castle were the police station, barracks and watchtower. The architectural styling may have changed but their ancestral purpose and significance remained stubbornly embedded in these buildings. By situating his photographs in this historical context, Olley allows his work and the viewer to chew, in Seamus Heaney's words, "the cud of memory."



The silent drama of the photograph, Golf Five Zero watchtower, Crossmaglen, provides a repertoire of visual gestures that recur in many of the images in the collection. This particular photograph is of an urban landscape - a street with a scattering of cars - but one where only the vestigial traces of human activity and life are present. "Some images do contain individuals," remarks Olley, "but I found during the editing process that including them robbed the alien presence these structures exude and therefore, in my view, to include passers-by made less powerful imagery." Paradoxically, this absence allows the buildings to articulate in a non-verbal way the unspoken truths that human testimonies struggle to describe. Where human beings have a tendency to rationalise and excuse, especially in conflict situations, these buildings speak directly without obfuscation. It is the viewer alone who is left to dialogue with the photograph in an uneasy face to face.

This malign structure, like something escaped from the imagination of H G Wells, has shouldered its way between family homes and chemist. The watchtower is a construction of unforgiving, jagged edges that mirrors the sectarian divide it watches over. There is no attempt to have this building sympathise with the surroundings or disguise the fact that it exists as an instrument of surveillance. The real purpose of such buildings is symbolic. They exist as a symbols of control. To work, symbols need to be seen and speak in a direct manner. The fact that this building is protected with a cage of mesh and CCTV shows that it is a fully operational symbol, hated and feared in equal measures by the local community.

Juxtaposing the domestic and the military creates stark tensions, but it also reveals the resilience of the quotidian. Olley describes these domestic buildings as "being 'politically invisible,' part of the non-violent resistance..." The daily rhythms of life defiantly continue through their presence. They will not be altered by the occupation of a squatter force. The chemist will remain open. Prescriptions will be handed over and medicines collected. Gardens with manicured lawns and plaster ornaments will continue to be cared for. Though communities are forced to live under the shadow of uncertainty and brutality, the front doorstep and backyard remain pockets of domestic resistance. They will not surrender.



Many of these photographs have a ghostly frame, soiled edges. This has occurred in the development process where the Type 55 Polaroid film stock has met a backing frame and not produced a clear, consistent image. The photographs are left with a smudged border. Jonathan Olley has chosen not to crop these photographs but to leave them with their lesions and liquid blemishes. "I think most of all I'm not attempting to hide the medium. Some would say it is not "professional practice"," Olley admits, "Though that sort of criticism tends to come from individuals who, in my humble opinion, "have bought the wrong ticket" and misunderstand the message behind the work. I suppose [this is] the difference between art and documentary."

These borders also point to the way that political realities bleed in unpredictable ways into the crevices of ordinary life. They cannot be easily framed or cropped. Depending on your viewpoint, they slip in and out of focus. At the very margins of vision and understanding, the present is brought into chafing proximity with the past, the political with the domestic, religion with the state. "Provided that the police and judiciary do not treat people from all sides of the sectarian, religious, class and racial divide with equality there will always be the opportunity for unrest," warns Olley. It is for this reason that the margins are an essential component of this artistic project.

In his photographs, Jonathan Olley attempts to order the historically contingent and endow it with a significance beyond itself. These photographs are more than documents of a time and place, but indicate wider concerns, historically and socially. The camera, Jonathan Olley suggests, can speak the truth.

Some of the Castles of Ulster photographs can be seen in the Tate Modern Exhibition, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera which will travel later this year to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and in 2011, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Castles of Ulster, Jonathan Olley, Factotum Books (www.factotum.org.uk) 2007

With thanks to Jonathan Olley for giving permission to use some of his photographs in this blog post.