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Invisible Cities 2007

 

Times Online            December 04, 2005

Empty Promise

Paul Seawright's haunting photographs of Lagos capture rare moments of solitude in a teeming world, says Cristin Leach

Every hour, 21 new inhabitants arrive in the Nigerian city of Lagos. That's 504 people a day, 3,528 a week, more than 180,000 a year. A journey of 15km through the city's crowded streets can take up to three hours, so markets are spontaneously erected on traffic-jammed bridges.Corruption is rife and city planners are incapable of controlling the sprawl of slums along the city's Atlantic lagoon coastline. Its sewage facilities are inadequate and clean drinking water is at a premium. More than 10,000 tons of refuse is generated daily. This is Lagos, the world's fastest- growing megacity.

This phenomenon of unprecedented urban growth is what attracted the Belfast-born photographer Paul Seawright to his latest project: the cities of Africa. For his first solo show in six years at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, he travelled to Johannesburg in South Africa; Lusaka, the Zambian capital; Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital; and Lagos, Nigeria's commercial hub. By 2015 the population is expected to exceed 23m and the former Nigerian capital will become the world's third largest city. Having outstripped New York, Mexico City and Shanghai, it will stand third only to Tokyo and Mumbai.Everything we know about Lagos conjures up images of masses and masses of people, but Seawright doesn't do crowds. What he does best is empty spaces. This is what makes his latest series, Invisible Cities, particularly interesting. His work has long been defined by absence.Of a series he took around a homeless shelter in Rotterdam in the late 1990s he said: ≥I have always been fascinated by the invisible, the unseen, the subject that doesn't easily present itself to the camera.≤ It's a quote that could apply to any of his work. Seawright never takes the picture you were expecting him to take.

Among the most striking of the nine large-scale prints in the Kerlin show are three portraits. They are striking not just because they deliberately ignore the teeming, overcrowded life presented by these unplanned metropolises, but also because they seek out individuals who, by their anonymity, represent countless others, emphasising the fate of the individual in a city. This is what he does best, images of loneliness and isolation charged with inexplicit meaning. Only one of his portrait subjects looks at the camera: it's a toddler at its mother's knee in an abandoned waiting room. All around are torn boxes of Vaseline, Lipton tea and a pool of water that spreads beneath an unoccupied bench. The adults in these three photographs turn their faces away, rendering a series of remarkably intimate moments so exquisitely composed that they almost seem staged. This is stark reality caught at its most visually pleasing.

What springs immediately to mind is how, in these cities of millions, Seawright managed to uncover his trademark isolated places. Did he simply wander through buildings until he opened a door to encounter this solitary mother and child? How did he find himself in the back of a tiny print shop, photographing the owner asleep on a bench? Did he meander down an alleyway and chance upon the resigned torpor of a well-groomed young woman sitting on a plastic garden chair? As always, Seawright betrays his presence only through his unerring aesthetic sensibility, here in the dynamic slash that cuts across several of the prints: the foreshortening of the bench that draws the viewer into Untitled (woman and child), the electricity lines that cross an opaque sky over fog-bound dockland shacks in Mist.

The show takes the viewer on a journey, from the romantic perfection of a barely visible peninsula through the old newspaper headlines reading ≥Famine, Fear and Distress≤ in a print called History; and via the shimmering reflection of an electricity pylon that dwarfs three figures stooping on a debris-strewn beach, and from there on to those three powerful portraits. Seawright has always straddled the awkward line between documentary photographer and artist, but it's a balancing act he manages gracefully. Although his prints vibrate with social, political and historical significance, they also do something else. They are always in keeping with both his thematic and aesthetic concerns as an artist. These latest are no exception.

Invisible Cities follows a long-running theme: the photographs he took in Rotterdam were collectively called The Missing; his last big project, for the Imperial War Museum in London, was a series of photographs taken in postwar Afghanistan, entitled Hidden (shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2003). He has taken images of anonymous feet beneath black rubber and sequined sex shop curtains, shot dingy corners of prison cells and Northern Ireland police stations. He has witnessed and committed to film scenes of crime, violence, death and the aftermath of all three. He has been to places most of us wouldn't want to go and seen things we might prefer not to see. So even in apparently innocent territory (such as Tallaght and the Welsh countryside) he has often produced images that are rife with fear and suspicion. Here the message is softer, perhaps softened by the presence of people. There is a certain edginess in some of the prints, particularly Machine, which is a shot of metal boxes laced with wires standing in the corner of an empty room. As with all his work, a narrative is implied but nothing is given away.

Uncharacteristically for Seawright, there is no suggestion of fear in the photographs, but there is a strong sense of something else, particularly in the portraits. It may be inertia, it may also be resignation, but it is certainly a sense of waiting. The clock on the wall above the sleeping man in Untitled (man) reads half past two, but we wonder if time has stopped. The show does not identify the images with particular cities, although the majority appear to be from Lagos. In Untitled (Dolphin Estate), rows of concrete apartment blocks provide the backdrop to a raised freeway traversing the beach on concrete stilts, a bare advertising hoarding waits for a soft drink or mobile phone advertisement. Satellite dishes, water tanks and air-conditioning units cling precariously to walls, ugly carbuncles on uglier grey homes. There are no people to be seen, although many must live here. Again there is a sense of anticipation, of something about to happen, as opposed to the feeling most often evoked by Seawright's photographs, that something has just happened.

Perhaps most remarkable is the overwhelming sense of calm and quiet, something Seawright has discovered in one of the last places on earth one might have expected him to find it. Photography brings him to places where he can find himself, paradoxically by losing himself. Seawright is good at making himself invisible. Other photographers who travel to places of conflict and poverty often leave the viewer pondering the inescapable question of how they felt as they pressed the shutter. Throughout his career, Seawright has worked towards negating his presence. Often he achieves this so completely that viewers feel they are the only ones witnessing the scene. It's an expert illusion. This isn't everyone's Lagos, but it is Seawright's, a city where moments of solitary isolation and beauty can be found among the bustling millions.

Paul Seawright ã Invisible Cities, Kerlin gallery, until December 17