Following on from its previous exhibition, Reframing the Border, which explored the diverse social and psychological issues surrounding the borderlands of Ireland, the Gallery of Photography will soon play host to The Lost Moment, an exhibition that will charter the tumultuous year of 1968 in Northern Ireland. As Brexit looms larger, these divisions haunt the Irish psyche, and the two exhibitions examine our innate difficulty with conceptual borders.
The Lost Moment is curated by Sean O’Hagan, a leading photography and art journalist for the Observer and the Guardian. It will be a retrospective on the civil rights marches against Catholic discrimination in housing and jobs. At the time, in order to be eligible to vote in the local elections, it was necessary to be a homeowner, most of whom were middle or upper-class Protestants.
These events were a prelude to a lingering and weary period of violent history. Crass police brutality was broadcast all over the world provoking a global media discourse about the Northern Irish civil rights movement. This imagery reverberated through all political spheres especially as it mirrored that of the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. Photography of the American civil rights march by Steve Schapiro will be showcased alongside photographs documenting the Northern Irish demonstrations of 1968. This will pose an interesting correlation between two campaigns fighting for many of the same basic human necessities.
The exhibition will also include work by the pioneering Ian Berry. The artist documented many of the most iconic images of the Troubles and has admitted that the violence he saw during the conflict provoked him to consider forgetting his mission as a photography journalist in order to intervene in the action. Photos by David Hurn, another photographer of the period, will also be showcased among many others.
The collection of work presented will propose a prologue to this tragic and weary period of relentless violence by revisiting a seminal year of the early civil rights marches. The title denotes the fleeting moment of collective hope and innocence in a time nearing the precipice of the Troubles, fracturing the historical perspective of an era drenched in blind hatred. It will focus on the collective psyche of the nationalist movement and speculate a moment where history could have taken a very different path. The exhibition opens on the September 27th and will run until November 4th.
