Angela Kelly

Topics: Editing, Text

Angela Kelly’s website

http://www.angelakellyphoto.com/

Angela Kelly’s faculty page at Rochester Institute of Technology

http://cias.rit.edu/faculty-staff/44

Angela Kelly at the Museum of Contemporary Photography

http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/kelly_angela.php

Angela Kelly, Catharsis: Images of post conflict belfast, 2008-2012

Belfast, N. Ireland has a painful history. More recently, I barely recognize the place. It is not so much the idea that Belfast has re‐invented itself as part of a new Europe that intrigues me rather, it is the residue or trace of what it once was and still is, coupled with a sense of the new that I find evocative.

I am interested in how photography speaks to the concept of absence as much as reality. Photographs resonate as repositories of a fragmented history beckoning the viewer towards a new relationship to time and place. In particular, concepts of identity, memory, and the history of place have permeated my photographic work for more than two decades. Initially personal loss and tragedy provoked a shift in my practice from a meta-critical exploration of the documentary to a broader exploration of cultural identity itself. No less critical than former projects, my work shifted to examine the vernacular image within the context of personal and social history. This binding of the social, historical and the personal within a fine art practice has played out in subtly different yet complementary ways in a number of projects.

In these images, the small photographs, made mostly by my father, are from my personal family album. They were made on the Catholic side of the West Belfast peace wall in my neighborhood of West Belfast. The street photographs were made on the Protestant side of the peace wall by me, so there are many dualities explored in this work; father /daughter, private/public. Catholic/Protestant. Nationalist/Loyalist as well as the underlying theme of previous trouble sites reinvented as tourist sites. This was my attempt to cross the divide. The GPS references both Belfast's military past and its present preoccupation with redefining itself as a tourist site.