Carnegie Mellon University
February 09, 2015

Things Left Unsaid

Photography, Conflict and the City

Things Left Unsaid

This event has been CANCELED, we will try to reschedule at a later date

Photographic artist Paul Seawright (b. 1965 Belfast) will present his work on the conflict in Northern Ireland and discuss how he and other artists have used photography to extend the narrative of The Troubles and re-articulate photography’s role in relation to Ireland and other conflict situations dominated by mainstream, institutional photographic practice.
 
Seawright’s landscape photographs acknowledge that wars are fought over both real and imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against the ‘other’ constructing landscapes of division and disenfranchisement; communities, including his own are displaced and dislocated, while ideology constructs identities based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion.
 
The construction of space and place, politics and power are fundamental components of space, as is the relationship between visibility invisibility – the connecting threads that run through much of Seawright¹s work. His images from Northern Ireland, Europe, Afghanistan, Africa and North America, encompass a number of interconnecting themes: the city, conflict, social fracture, identity, history and physical, cultural and ideological borders.