Photography, Community and Memory in the Belfast Exposed Collection

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Founded in 1983 as a community based photography project, Belfast Exposed has a near thirty year history of working with photographers to produce and exhibit socially engaged photography, and is the city's only dedicated gallery of contemporary photography. The archival collection that has grown over this period now contains in the region of half a million photographs, covering a range of subject matter, from parades and civil disturbances to the everyday life of Belfast communities. It is this collection that provides the central focus of the project. Although in recent years BX has commissioned a small number of artistic engagements with the collection, and a relatively small number of the images have been digitised and made available online, the collection has yet to be the subject of any sustained research.The project therefore aims to do a number of things. First, to understand how the collection has developed in a changing social, cultural and political context; the history of the collection is known but not well documented. Second, to explore the contemporary cultural value of the collection for communities and audiences in Belfast and beyond. Third, to situate the work in the context of changing understandings and uses of photography, specifically in its relation to community memory and history. Fourth, to inform the organisation's strategies for the presentation and display of images from the historical collection for contemporary audiences. The project will open up a reflective space around the collection in which to explore and debate a range of issues concerning the meaning of the photographic record, its relationship to post-conflict Belfast, the responsibility of the organisation as a guardian of this visual history and its agency as producer of visions of the city.The project will draw on theoretical literature on photography, memory and history, and academic studies of visual documentation and display in post-conflict settings elsewhere in the world, in order to contextualise the particular case of this collection and inform its interpretation. The collaboration between the academic and non-academic partners has a number of benefits. For the academic partner, the project provides an opportunity to extend a programme of research on photography. The student will have unique access to the collection and the organisation, around which they will shape a doctoral project. They will be able to bring theory and ideas derived from academic study, as they relate to photographic practice and display, into a close relationship with the challenges of practice. For the non-academic partner, the project provides the opportunity to have someone work with them on the collection; to contextualise the material through reference to comparative work elsewhere, and bring forward new ideas around its cultural significance and how this might be realised for contemporary audiences. It is anticipated that there will be a long term impact on the organisation's strategy for the collection, in addition to academic outputs.