The story is about a boy and his relationship with an elderly priest who, after having just suffered a third stroke, is about to die. The boy, anxiously waiting for news, is then casually informed of the priests death while at dinner with his aunt and uncle. It transpires that the priest had been schooling the boy in the ways of the church and they had formed a close bond. This situation was something that the boy’s guardians did not wholly approve of, as the priest was in a state of disgrace, after having suffered some sort of mental breakdown some years back after accidentally breaking a chalice. All of this is revealed by means of somewhat elliptical conversations, primarily between his aunt and the priest’s two sisters, who they go and visit at the end of the story.

The whole story is rife with spectral presences, dreams and death. The dead priest appears to the boy in his sleep that night, and later the boy reminisces about all the priest taught him – the arcane rituals of the church, Napolean and the catacombs, the secrets of the confessional. The priest, both in life and in death, is portrayed as a slightly hideous and frightening figure, with his foul snuff habit, his cavernous nostrils and discoloured teeth. We never meet the priest when he was alive, and so it’s tempting to imagine that he never really was. Even the boy seems to drift through the story like a ghost – no-one directly addresses him and the others speak of him as if he’s not really there.

Of course I could be projecting all this onto Joyce’s story based on the photograph. It has been suggested to me before that these pictures are reminiscent of a form of spectral photography: a mechanism for attempting to capture presences on film, a means of giving access to some sort of plane of being that we are not normally privy too. We can think of ghost-hunters setting up cameras in supposedly haunted houses that repeatedly shoot pictures all through the night in the hope of capturing a spectre. This seems ludicrous, and it’s easy to dismiss any positive results of this type of thing as being, if not blatantly faked, certainly explicable in terms of tricks of the light, artifacts of the lens, something to do with the exposure, and so on. However, what if we think of ghosts not as presences from beyond death, beings from another plane, but as manifestations of dislocations of time? Imagine if you had a sort of radical mental disorder that meant you experienced time differently to everyone else. Imagine if things were infinitely slower for you than for other people around you. Imagine if 16 minutes and 50 seconds seemed to pass in an instant and that it was compressed into what seems like a single moment. Would everyone around you not seem like fleeting presences that are barely there, or in other words, would they not be like ghosts? You would be unable to communicate with them but you would be aware of their presence. They might call to you but you would be unable to respond fast enough to form a connection. If we think of ghosts as involving this sort of distortion of time then certainly the photograph above might be a reasonable depiction of what that might look like.

This connection between ghosts and time was used by Jacques Derrida in his book Specters Of Marx. Taking his cue from the first line of the Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels said that “a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism”, Derrida suggests that in spite of the so-called end of history proclaimed after the fall of the Berlin wall, the spirit of Marx will return to haunt us. Of course he doesn’t literally mean that old man Marx will start appearing at the ends of our beds in the middle of the night, but rather that while communism might be dead, the historical ideas and ideals that inspired it will return and can potentially manifest themselves in new ways. He invented the term hauntology to capture this notion of how things from the past can continually reappear in our present. There’s a sense of the uninvited about it: it’s not a case of actively uncovering and seeking to be informed by what happened in the past, but rather things from the past imposing themselves on our present, whether we like it or not. The term hauntology was later picked up by music writers like Simon Reynolds to try and capture that glitchy, scratchy, ghostly sound of genres like dubstep; music that samples sounds from the past and shoves them into contemporary contexts, resulting in a kind of dislocated temporality.

Okay, this seems like an appropriate moment to stop and listen to the song Ghosts by Japan, if for no other reason that it’s great. I’ve just noticed that the photograph on the cover of their album Tin Drum, from which the song is taken, itself contains a faded, peeling photograph of Chairman Mao. I’m sure Derrida would approve. Thanks to Claire Howe and Annie Ryan for facilitating making this photograph at The Dubliners happen.

this site is not really helpful it could use a little more facts this is to who ever posted this to google

I thought I would try and address this situation a little bit by trying to come up with some facts about this photograph:

1. It is a photograph of the band Animal Collective
2. It was taken in Vicar Street a few weeks back
3. The band were touring their new album which is called Centipede Hz
4. They had huge inflatable stage props with lights inside them
5. It is an exposure of approximately 4 minutes
6. The aperture setting was f32
7. It was taken using a Cambo camera with a 90mm Schneider lens
8. It was shot on Ilford FP4 4×5 film
9. The film was processed by Artur Sikora of the Darkroom Service
10. The negative was scanned on an Epson V700 scanner
11. The resultant digital image file is 1200 by 960 pixels wide giving a total of 1,152,000 pixels altogether

Happy Christmas.

Graham Harman is an interesting character. He’s a leading figure in contemporary philosophy and holds a professorship at the American University in Cairo, yet earlier in life had a stint working as a sports writer in Chicago. It seems an unlikely trajectory, but for Harman it makes perfect sense, as his work insists on grappling with the real stuff of the world rather than retreating entirely into the mysteries of abstract thought. This might sound slightly dull but in fact it is anything but. Harman manages to mystify this real stuff, so much so that after spending some time reading him, I can’t look at my toaster in quite the same way anymore. Based on my somewhat cursory exposure to his work, I’m going to try and quickly sketch out some of his basic ideas. I can’t possibly do them justice but I’m going to try anyway because I think they lead to an interesting new way of thinking about these photographs I am doing. Apologies in advance to any students of philosophy reading this. It might be best if you stop here.

Harman’s fundamental idea is that Western philosophy has completely lost its way for the last 200 years. Ever since Kant’s so-called Copernican revolution, where it was decided that the world revolved around the human mind and consequently that the task of philosophy was to understand the world by means of how it appears within this mind, philosophy has been fixated on the human. This manifests itself in various ways. An extreme version of it would be a form of idealism that goes as far as claiming that the world outside the mind does not even exist at all. A less extreme version is that represented by phenomenology, which suggests that while the outside world may exist, the only way we can access it is through our perceptions, and hence the starting point of philosophy is a rigorous examination of this mind/world interface.

Harman rejects this and insists that we should be examining things in the world on their own terms and not privileging how they present themselves to human consciousness. In one sense this leads us to what is normally called realism (as opposed to idealism) and possibly a very mechanistic, scientific, and empirical view of the universe, one that abandons the murky territory of human consciousness altogether in favour of physical entities that can be measured and analyzed. However, this is not Harman’s game either – he doesn’t abandon the weirdness of the human mind, but rather extends this weirdness to everything else in the world as well. So, there is nothing special about human experience of the world, it is in fact but one among a myriad of ways in which things within the world can relate to, and interact with, each other.

He uses the term object to refer to one of these “things within the world” and consequently his form of philosophy is referred to as object-oriented. He claims that all Western thought tends to ignore the object, either treating it as a construction within human consciousness and therefore not real (most post-Kantian philosophy), or else treating it as some sort of largely accidental conglomeration of more fundamental elements like atoms, particles or quarks (science). Harman’s goal is to restore the object to what he sees as it’s rightful place at the centre of our thinking. In order to help do so he develops a philosophy of objects that grants them status as autonomous entities and also transcends the idealist/realist divide by explaining how essentially they can both exist and not exist at the same time.

He does this by firstly making a distinction between what he calls sensual objects and real objects. A sensual object is the object as it exists within my mind, as it has been perceived by means of my senses, or at least by means of whatever apparatus I am equipped with to allow me some sort of access to the world. The sensual object may or may not be presently visible to me. As I write this, if I turn my head to my left I can see my guitar hanging on the wall. If I it turn back again, although I can’t actually see the guitar anymore, I am confident that it’s still there, and it still exists as a sensual object in my mind. The sensual object is constructed by means of sense impressions, or what Harman then calls sensual qualities, which are the properties of the object that we can ascertain by means of how we perceive or experience it – the blue of the body, the smoothness of the back of the neck, the fuller tone that I hear when I switch from back pickup to front, the pain in my fingers I get from the strings when I haven’t played it in a while.

Complementing these sensual objects with their sensual qualities we then also have real objects with real qualities, as Harman is no pure idealist denying the existence of the outside world. These real objects are deeply mysterious though. The guitar is clearly a real object, as it exists as a physical entity in the world, but I can only access its sensual counterpart, can only construct a version of it based on what my senses tell me about it. This is always inadequate. I can never exhaust the possibilities of the real object, or as Harman puts it, the real object constantly withdraws from view, into a shadowy domain that I am never privy to. The real object has real qualities: these are its properties, its characteristics, without which it would not be the same object, but examination of these real qualities can only ever be a speculative endeavour, as we can’t directly access them.

So, there is always one real object, with an associated set of real qualities, but this gives rise to multiple sensual objects, each of which is constructed from associated sensual qualities, and each of which is a result of some entity’s sensual experience of the real object. So far so good I think. An ant’s experience of my guitar, formed by crawling slowly across it’s surface, is radically different to mine, and it seems plausible that this consequently gives rise to a completely different realisation of the guitar within whatever passes for the ant’s consciousness. We could alternatively take this in the opposite direction and speculate on the existence of other forms of conscious beings (Gods or ghosts perhaps) whose experience of the guitar is completely different to ours, having the ability to employ a sensual apparatus the nature of which we can’t even conceive of.

This talk of consciousness is something of a red herring though, because where things get truly weird is when we then reintroduce the notion outlined above that consciousness (human or otherwise) has no privileged position within the universe; it’s only one means by which an object (the human in this case) can relate to, or access, another one. The guitar is hanging on a bracket which is fixed into the wall. This means that a relation has been formed between the guitar and the bracket, and the bracket’s experience of the guitar is mediated by means of the parameters of that experience. The guitar exists as a sensual object for the bracket and while this may not take a conscious form (though how would we know anyway if it did?) it may take a myriad of other forms that we don’t have access to, and hence can only speculate about.

This might be straying a little off-course here so let me get back to what I think is interesting about this stuff with respect to photography, and in particular with respect to the long exposure photography that I am doing. Harman takes these four aspects of his object model (sensual objects, sensual properties, real objects and real properties) and teases apart what he refers to as the tension resulting from the relationship between each of the four object/property pairs. In the case of sensual objects and their sensual properties, this tension corresponds directly to time, as the sensual object is built from a synthesis of it’s sensual properties that present themselves to us over time. Imagine if there was no time. In that case the sensual object would be directly equivalent to a fixed and determined set of sensual properties i.e. exactly as it appears to us right now and no more. But as we experience time, the sensual properties of the object are constantly shifting – we walk around and look at it from different angles, the light falls differently on it and changes it’s colour throughout the day, we pick it up and feel different parts of it and so on. We don’t suddenly think it’s a different object when this happens though; we are able to maintain the integrity of the sensual object in our minds in spite of its shifting sensual properties.

So, we might think of a conventional photograph as being a representation of a particular set of sensual qualities (those related to the reception of light) accessible at the moment the shutter was opened and therefore the notion of a photograph as something that freezes time suddenly becomes more than a well-worn cliche. In Harman’s world, that is precisely what a photograph does, not because of the usual reasons (as outlined for example by Barthes in Camera Lucida where the photograph is granting access to the past) but because the photograph represents a world without time, where a representative snapshot of some sensual properties of the object have been used to create a representation of the sensual object itself. There is no possibility of them unfolding further and therefore no time.

A long exposure photograph however seems to me to be doing something slightly different. In this, we are getting a sense of something that is occurring over a period of time, or to put it in Harman’s terms, we are getting a depiction of the sensual (visual in this case) properties of things, one that is not fixed to a single moment but instead consists of representations of these properties over a period of minutes or hours. It therefore corresponds more closely to how we experience the relationship between sensual objects and sensual properties, and hence how we experience time itself.

We can take this a little bit further though and try and tease out the implications of the word representation within this framework. In one sense the sensual object is itself a representation in the first place, as it’s a representation of the real object. We would have to conclude then that the photograph (any photograph) is a representation of a representation, or at least we would have to conclude this if we insist on holding to the idea that it’s a depiction of the sensual object. When you think about it though, this seems like a pretty strange thing to believe. The only way a photograph could really be a representation of the sensual object that I perceive would be if the camera was some sort of psychic device that had access to my consciousness. So what if we abandon the idea that it’s such a representation at all? If we do this then we are back to the traditional realist view of what photography is, i.e. the imprint of photons on photographic film and a resultant impression of reality, or as Sontag famously put it a “trace of the real”.

However, if we think about this in the context of object oriented philosophy, it stops being a rather well-trodden and outmoded way of thinking about photography, and instead becomes something that is replete with all sorts of Harmanesque weirdness. For example, we could conclude that the photograph is still some sort of representation of a sensual object, but it’s not the sensual object that results from how human consciousness accesses physical reality – it is the sensual object that results from how the film itself accesses reality. In other words what we are looking at is a depiction of how one object, the film, accesses or perceives another object, and what we get in the photograph is some sort of representation of its sensual properties at the moment (or moments) the shutter is opened. In conclusion, a photograph is neither a human construction nor a trace of reality, but instead is a rare glimpse into the murky world of how objects experience each other.

I think I had better stop here and briefly say something about the photograph at the top. It was taken during a rehearsal for the show Mirror Mirror that was running as part of Absolut Fringe 2012. Big thanks to Niamh Creely and her crew for setting this up. Finally, it’s worth mentioning also that there will be an event early next year in Dublin called Weaponising Speculations which will be about speculative realism (within which Harman’s brand of object oriented philosophy falls). Some information about this can be found here. Looks like it could be really good.

At the time they only had two releases. Both of them were double live CDs, both were released on a Japanese label called PSF that had virtually no distribution outside Japan, and consequently both were impossible to find. There were of course no Soundcloud links to click on, no iTunes, no online audio of any kind, and so it was impossible to find out what they really sounded like, impossible to actually hear them. This didn’t stop me becoming a fan though. Based on the rabidly enthusiastic descriptions of their music that I encountered, I constructed it in my head anyway, and it loomed large in my imagination for some time before I eventually got my hands on one of their albums. I can’t recall now how that happened. It was either through a mail order operation such as Forced Exposure, or the result of a visit to a record shop like Rough Trade in London or Other Music in New York.

I can’t say it was a disappointment when I finally heard them, but I did struggle to reconcile what was coming out of the speakers with what I had imagined. Like a movie adaptation of a book you really like, it never seemed quite right somehow. I still bought more of their CDs, as by this stage they were becoming more prolific and their albums were easier to come by. Occasionally I would come home from a night out and crash out in a stupor on the sofa with Fushitsusha blaring on the headphones, thinking that now was the time that all would be revealed to me. Inevitably I would fall asleep during a quiet part and then be woken up 30 minutes later, terrified, by Haino’s tortured screaming in my right ear. This didn’t help.

A few years later, in 2001, Keiji Haino played in Dublin. By this stage he had disbanded Fushitsusha but was still releasing a bewildering stream of albums, some solo, some collaborations with other figures from the world of experimental music. Some of them were not unlike the phenomenal guitar explorations that Fushitsusha were famed for, but many were completely different – voice improvisation, weird Japanese folk, and even an album of (I kid you not) hurdy-gurdy music. He was booked to do a three-night stand in the Project Arts Centre with the idea being that something completely different would be going on each evening. The first night was to consist entirely of a solo percussion performance. The second was to be a trio formed by Haino on guitar, local lad Paul G. Smyth on piano, and English improviser Barry Guy on bass. The third night was to be a collaboration between Haino and a local traditional musician on uileann pipes (whose name I have also forgotten). I bought tickets for all three nights but only really expected the improv trio to deliver anything like what I wanted. As it happens the one I was looking forward to the least, the solo percussion one, turned out to be completely mesmerising, while the others (though not without their moments) again fell short of what I imagined Haino to be capable of.

Soon after that, distracted by other things, I lost track of what he was doing. My Haino Cds got relegated to the boxes up in the attic, the 2nd division of stuff that I never get around to listening to and don’t have the space for downstairs. However, earlier this year I heard a rumour that he had started playing with Fushitsusha again, and sure enough there quickly followed an announcement that they were playing at a festival in England, and then that was followed by news of an October gig in Dublin. The gig happened last week and the photo above is 9 minutes and 29 seconds of it. It was phenomenal. A friend of mine once said to me, in reference to Casper Brotzmann (another fairly intense and heavy guitar improv type), that his stuff sounded like a city exploding. This is a pretty apt description of Haino’s sound too. I found myself thinking that this is obviously what an electric guitar is supposed to sound like, and that everyone else prior to this has been doing something fundamentally wrong, stumbling about and not quite grasping how to use the bloody thing properly. Sometime soon when I have a day off I am going to venture onto the attic, dig out all the Haino/Fushitsusha albums I own, and then listen to them all in sequence – very loud. I think I’m finally ready.

I’ve recently been reading Terry Eagleton’s book On Evil which, for something that is concerned with the awful atrocities humans are capable of inflicting upon each other, is surprisingly funny in parts. The basic gist of it is that there are two dominant ways of thinking about why people do bad stuff to other people. The first one is the traditional conservative viewpoint, which holds that some people are just bad, there’s not much point trying to reason about why they do the things they do, and there’s nothing to be gained by trying to rehabilitate them. Incarceration and punishment are the only legitimate responses, and in some cases, the ultimate punishment of death is warranted. This is a way of thinking that finds its most extreme form of contemporary expression in the use of the death penalty in the US, but it’s also what fuels those calls for longer and harsher prison sentences that we are all used to hearing. Eagleton cites the case of the police officer who arrested one of the killers of Jamie Bulger. The policeman remarked afterwards that when he looked into the boy’s eyes he knew immediately that he was evil. In other words, hang ‘em high, but if you’re not allowed do that, then lock ‘em up and throw away the key.

The other way of thinking is one that is ultimately derived from Marxism. It denies the existence of any kind of inherent evil, and attempts to explain bad behaviour by means of environmental factors, in particular socio-economic ones. So people steal because they need to do so in order to provide for themselves, they kill because circumstances dictate that such ruthless and brutal acts are necessary, and if they seem inured to violence it’s because the environment in which they were raised taught them that it’s just a normal part of life. If a fairer and more equal society is put in place, then the necessity of engaging in such acts will diminish, and in the meantime, education and rehabilitation are appropriate ways of trying to alter people’s behaviour for the better.

You might expect a lifelong left-winger such as Eagleton to come down firmly in the second camp but what makes the book interesting is that he finds both positions to be inadequate, particularly when we are dealing with the type of badness that we would usually be tempted to describe as evil – the Bulger murders, the Nazi holocaust, serial killers, and so on. Such things are not easily explained in terms of environmental factors. We can use them to try and explain why a mugger beats someone to the ground and steals their wallet, but we are on much shakier ground if we try and use them to explain why someone might take sadistic pleasure in torturing someone else. The right-wing hang ‘em high brigade would insist that there’s no explanation to be had here, and little point in pondering such behaviour. The torturer is an evil person and should be dealt with accordingly. There’s a giant contradiction here though. If the torturer is simply bad-by-nature then there’s really nothing he can do about it. He’s not responsible for his actions and therefore what’s the justification for punishing him?

Eagleton instead appeals to psychoanalytic theory to examine these things and suggests that evil is linked to what Freud called the death drive; those who fall too far under its spell are subject to a sort of existential torment that can only be relieved by inflicting suffering, by essentially forcing others to share in what they see as the meaninglessness of the world. I’d say more about this but firstly I’m only half way through the book, and secondly I should say something about the photograph above. It’s a shot from another Absolut Fringe production, Tromluí Phinocchio / Pinocchio – a Nightmare by Moonfish Theatre. It’s an adaptation of the Pinochio story that takes it into some very dark places indeed, though having said that, like a lot of early children’s literature, the original story itself is rife with death, cruelty and hardship anyway. The photo is a six minute exposure of a scene where the owner of a puppet theatre is threatening to burn some of his performers alive by pouring petrol on them and lighting them up. There’s a modern tendency to try and sanitise fairy tales for children, as if they can be shielded from evil, but in reality most of them can take this stuff in their stride a lot better than we tend to give them credit for. There were a bunch of kids at this, including my own six year old daughter, and all of them seemed pretty non-plussed by what seemed to me to be a fairly terrifying scene.

Eagleton has a fair bit to say about children in his book, referring to literary sources like Lord Of The Flies and films such as The Exorcist. There is something particularly disturbing about the notion of evil in children, something that The Exorcist obviously plays on, as well as more recent movies such as We Need To Talk About Kevin.  We like to think of children as being inherently good and innocent, but really they are blank slates who gradually learn empathy and socialisation as they gain more experience of the world. Maybe the reason The Exorcist is so frightening is that we subconsciously recognise that this potential for badness is there lurking under the surface all the time. This lack of experience might also be the reason why a child can contemplate the thought of someone burning someone else alive with petrol, as they are secure in the knowledge that it’s just a story.  To an adult though, such stuff has inevitable resonances with necklace burnings in South Africa or monks immolating themselves as a form of political protest in Asia. For us, it’s real. I read the book of The Exorcist as a teenager and the most frightening part was not the lurid descriptions of demonic possession, but the short quotes at the start that described tortures inflicted on people by the Khmer Rouge.

A few years ago I went to see Eli Roth’s film Hostel when it came out in the cinema. It’s a piece of garbage, and I think I knew this before going, but I wanted to test myself to see if I could handle watching it. At the time there seemed to be a real trend, especially in art-house cinema, for depictions of extreme violence. I am squeamish about watching things like that and as a result a lot of cinema was passing me by. Hostel was notoriously violent and nasty so I figured that if I could deal with that, then I could surely deal with anything Michael Haneke or Lars Von Trier were likely to throw at me. As I said, it was total trash, and after the initial shock of the first ugly scene, it became fairly laughable. All the same there was something that profoundly irritated me about it, about the notion of depictions of torture as cheap entertainment. I couldn’t help imagining an Iraqi who had a family member die in one of Saddam’s cells (or indeed in the cells of one of the grisly militias who ran riot in his wake) finding out that people were sitting in multiplexes munching popcorn watching this sort of thing for fun. It occurs to me now that there’s an immaturity at work here on the part of the film-makers; like children who can’t comprehend the seriousness of someone being burned alive with petrol, they can’t comprehend the seriousness of what they are depicting in their film. This is not to say that such matters should not be the subject of cinema or theatre or art, but rather that if they are, then they demand a seriousness of treatment that seems to be beyond the likes of Eli Roth. This stuff is perhaps best left to the grown-ups.

It would be wrong of me to conclude this without saying something more about Pinocchio, lest I give the impression that it’s some sort of dark horror-show. It’s not of course: for the most part it’s a hugely entertaining, imaginatively staged, and very funny production. It’s got a brilliant way of incorporating Irish in such a way that even those of us with a tenuous grasp of Gaeilge can follow what’s going on. It’s also got a lovely Brechtian line in exposing the mechanics of theatrical illusion to the audience. For example, there’s a lady doing live Foley sound effects who is visible to the spectators at all times. I saw it twice and really enjoyed it both times. Their Dublin Fringe run is finished but according to their website they are going to be putting it on as part of the Galway Theatre Festival in October, so if you are down the West I recommend checking it out, and don’t be afraid to bring the little ones with you.

This is Constellations, by Paperdolls, which is currently running at D-Light studios as part of Absolut Fringe 2012. I’ll attempt to describe what it is, but that won’t be easy as I really don’t know what it is; it slips outside most of the normal categories that you might use to describe something like this. It’s a dance piece that takes place mostly in the air. It’s an acrobatic display that eschews all the cheesy narcissistic showing off which that normally entails. It’s a piece of performance art that revolves around the use of Japanese rope bondage. It’s a gig with a full band (Wolfbait) in the corner who blast out terrifyingly loud and intense noise rock. It’s eerie and unsettling and totally unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

The photograph above is an exposure of 6 minutes and 17 seconds, and was taken during the first section of the show. I shot it during a dress rehearsal so for that reason you can’t see the audience in the shot. They would normally be sitting around on mats. Most of the cast are sitting still in the centre of the room for this part, while one of them has her arms tied behind her back.  She then performs various acrobatic exercises with a partner, while her arms are still bound in this way. There is a real tension during this section as you can’t help thinking that if she slips, she can’t even use her hands to stop her face hitting the ground. There’s a huge level of trust involved between the participants, and watching it is like being privy to some sort of intimate, normally private, ritual. Soon after this, the whole thing goes completely nuts, but the enjoyment of this thing is all about not knowing what is going to happen next, so I’m not going to spoil it. It runs until this coming Saturday and you can book tickets here. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Karolina at Blow Magazine and Emily and Fionnuala at Paperdolls for facilitating this. This photograph has just been published in number 4 of Blow Mag’s Absolut Fringe 2012 special editions. You can check them all out here.

I took this photo at the dress rehearsal for Elevator, which is running at the Absolut Fringe 2012 festival. Doing these shots at theatre productions has turned out to be a little bit trickier than I initially thought. The concept is that the length of the exposure corresponds to the length of a scene, so each shot is therefore a photograph of a scene. The problem though is that many productions don’t have such rigid divisions into scenes, and even if they do, the transitions between them may not be at all obvious. I managed to nail the one above though I think.

Elevator is about a bunch of rich kids who have gathered together for a party when one of their number goes missing. All the action takes place in one room. There’s a lot of talking, flirting, arguing, partying, drug-taking, and recounting of debauched episodes from the past; and all of this is interspersed with musical numbers. The centre of the set has a huge couch that the actors sit on, lie on, dance on, and get off with each other on. Because the couch is a bright white colour, nothing in front of it comes out in the long exposure photograph, so it looks to me more like a dinner table than a couch. There are about seven actors in this photograph and they were all moving around quite a lot, so it’s pretty surprising that there is such clarity in it, and that at various points in the image, they can be made out very clearly.

This thing definitely has legs.

Thanks to Karolina at blow photo magazine, Louise at thisispopbaby and Ste Murray for facilitating this. You can see a whole bunch of great work that other photographers are doing at this year Fringe in blow magazine’s Absolut Fringe special editions.

Some of my work is going to be in an exhibition next week entitled Close To Closure that it happening in the Back Loft on Augustine Street in Dublin 8. It’s a group of eight photographers (Monika Fabijanczyk, Rebecca McGetrick, Artur Sikora, Sharon Murphy, Jeanette Lowe, Calin Ploscar, and Fiona O’Donnell are the others) and there’s some really interesting stuff there. I have been slowly starting on a new angle to my project, which is to apply the long exposure photography idea to theatre productions. I’ve done a few at this stage and the work I am going to show next week is from one of these. The shot above is one of those photographs and is from a play called When Irish Hearts Are Praying which was on last year as part of the Fringe festival. There’s an opening reception taking place next Wednesday (4th July) at 6pm and the artist Sean Hillen has kindly agreed to officially open the exhibition. It will then run until the 10th of July and it’s part of the OPEN programme for the PhotoIreland 2012 festival. Come along and say hello, there will be wine.

This is Thomas Bartlett, Iarla Ó Lionaird, Martin Hayes, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Dennis Cahill, otherwise known as The Gloaming, playing in Vicar Street a few weeks ago. An amazing gig and an amazing experience to be watching it all while photographing from the side of the stage. It was set up for me by Paul O’Connor at The Journal Of Music, who published the photo and also a short article I wrote to accompany it.  Big thanks to Paul, and also to Leagues O’Toole, Dennis Herlihy, Gary Sheehan and Iarla Ó Lionaird for helping make this happen.

The photograph above is also one of the prints that are in my current exhibition which is on view in Plugd at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. I went down last Thursday to set it all up and thanks are also due to Albert and Jim of Plugd for being so incredibly helpful and supportive. It’s going to be on until the beginning of July so do pop in and have a look if you find yourself in Cork city centre over the next few weeks.