SATURDAY 9TH JUNE 1973

© The Artist

SATURDAY 9TH JUNE 1973 1989

Paul Seawright (1965 – )

Details

Dimension
50.8 X 61 CM
Media
C-TYPE COLOUR PRINT
Accession number
P6176

Summary

Sectarian Murders consists of photographs of places where political murders have been committed in Northern Ireland over the past 30 years. Each is accompanied by the date on which the event occurred and a description of the event taken from one of three sources – Political Murder in Northern Ireland by Martin Dillon and Dennis Lehane, 1973, and the morning and evening newspapers The Belfast Newsletter and The Belfast Telegraph. All references to political organisations are omitted, in order to focus on the effects that terrorism has on innocent individuals. The work seeks to show only a handful of terrorist victims who had no involvement in their country’s problems. Their deaths are a result of man’s barbarism. Their reason for death being religion. My ultimate aim is to create an awareness, beyond the purely media representation and show the deaths of innocent people – Europeans like any other. By visiting the sites of their murders and using text from newspaper reports, inquests and books of the time, I hope I have successfully portrayed the brutality of indiscriminate murder in my country. I wish to evoke compassion and a desire to look further than the media representations of these deaths and for people to see a normal country crying out for an end to violence. Our problem is as much a humanitarian one as it is political. People must undergo a moral change, and combat their ability to accept so much death around them before any political change.

Documentary Dilemmas Aspects of British Documentary Photography 1983-1993, The British Council, London 1994