8 - Visualizing West Belfast, 1976–85: Documentary Photography and the Politics of Nostalgia

Summary

Abstract

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Lower Falls community of West Belfast was disrupted, reconfigured, and redefined. The decline of traditional industries and intensive urban redevelopment were responsible for a series of radical physical and social transformations which threatened working-class community and identity. This Chapter discusses how these processes were engaged with and made visible in the work of Northern Irish photographer Martin Nangle who photographed the community in the 1970s and ‘80s as part of a documentary project. Through an analysis grounded primarily in the close reading of photographs, this chapter will explore how Nangle's work engaged with a critical nostalgia in the depiction of the changing urban and social landscape of the area.

Keywords: Belfast; photography; urban; de-industrialization; redevelopment; working class

Figure 8.1 presents the viewer with a cityscape of Belfast that appears profoundly connected to industry. Rows of terraced houses are clearly visible in the foreground and stretch deeper into the composition before they are occluded by chimney smoke. Tall industrial buildings, smokestacks, and church spires occasionally punctuate the panorama. As the viewer is drawn into the composition, the city is concealed further before the eye rises to rest on the horizon line of the Belfast Hills. Smoke generated by houses and industrial buildings hangs low over the neighbourhood and blurs the leading lines created by the streets, interrupting any sense of directional movement. The use of light evokes a sense of pastness reinforced by the opacity and synesthetic effect of the smoke, simultaneously generating feelings of warmth, stillness, and temporal distance. The photograph looks like it could have been taken during the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Only the automobiles in the bottom-right betray that it was in fact taken in 1976. The photograph presents an overtly aesthetic and sentimental version of an urban community, thereby mythologizing industrialization.

The photograph manifests what Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott have critiqued as a “creeping industrial nostalgia,” or “smokestack nostalgia.” Such nostalgia has valorized industry, industrial landscapes, and industrial work within visual and textual explorations of industrial change. As sociologist Tim Strangleman has argued, such presentations of industrial nostalgia can be dangerous as they often fail to engage with the embodied realities of industrial work or lost industry.