After the Agreement

After the Agreement is an exploration and critical analysis of contemporary photography in Belfast after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and its relationship to a duty of memory, and ideas of justice and betrayal.

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The book draws on a series of practitioner-led talks by the photographers John Duncan, Mary McIntyre, Donovan Wylvie, Paul Seawright, Kai Olaf Hesse and David Farrell, providing a discursive space that is part academy, part community activism and part cultural practice. These were intended to enable an exploration of contemporary photography in analytical proximity to what is going on currently across a range of disciplines: urbanism and the regeneration of the city, curatorial practices, the arts academy, community activism and photographic practice. Through placing contemporary photography in dialogue with other disciplines and the contested histories of the city, the series explored the centrality and complexity of meaning as an intersection of the social, political and aesthetic.
After the Agreement makes public the critical conversations that systematically explore photography as civic negotiation and includes reproductions of a selection of photographs from the participating photographers: Paul Seawright's Conflicting Account, 2009; John Duncan's We Were Here, 2006, and Trees From Germany, 2003; Mary McIntyre's Interior Series, 1998 - 2000; David Farrell's Innocent Landscapes, 2001, and The Revisits, 2003; Donovan Wylvie's The Maze, 2004; and Kai Olaf Hesse's Topography of the Titantic, 2003.