'Collects'
A ‘collect’ picture is one that offers us the identity of someone killed in tragic circumstances. For newspaper photographers a ‘collect’ is part of the daily matter-of-fact language used in describing a picture, usually a family snap, collected for publication from the family or friends of a victim. It was in the close knit communities of Northern Ireland that hundreds of these private family pictures crossed over into the public realm in the most tragic of circumstances illustrating the almost daily loss of life during a conflict that spanned four decades.This project examines the idea of the physical nature of the connection between a photograph and the person photographed.It is dealt with at length in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1981). At its most basic level this belief can afford the living the opportunity to address the dead as if they were still present. This work examines those spaces between presence and absence defined by thefamily pictures of those who lost their lives in the 'troubles in Northern Ireland.' Stripped of any detail it is sufficient to know that the loss of all of those represented here, all victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland,was heart felt equally by all those left behind to mourn.
'The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, that was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze;' (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida)
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