There is a popular misconception that the painter and the photographer, like the farmer and the cowman, can't be friends. After all, didn't photography steal painting's thunder? Aren't they in some way rivals laying claim to the same territory? There is some truth to all that. The advent of photography changed painting in several ways, writes Aidan Dunne.
It put many thousands of portrait artists out of business, for example. But any presumed antagonism between the two has not been as straightforward as it might seem.
For a long time there was a kind of snobbish disdain for photography among some echelons of the fine art establishment. The notion of using photographs as references was frowned upon, in public at any rate. In private, of course, things were different. Several revisionist historical studies have determined that painters have used photography pretty much since its inception. David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge details how painters have consistently, and pragmatically, used lens-based technologies for centuries. Equally, photography developed in the context of pictorial conventions that were shaped by painting. A reasonable observer would surely conclude that there has been, and is, an ongoing dialogue between painting and photography.
There are currently two large group exhibitions running in Belfast, and both, in different ways, reflect aspects of this dialogue. The Double Image at the Golden Thread Gallery, curated by Dougal McKenzie (himself a painter), is a fascinating exploration of what he terms "a new relationship" between painting and photography.
He writes of a "new 'way of looking' embodied in much contemporary painting". That is a sound observation, but the new way of looking, it can be argued, extends to photography as well - although, as with painting, not to all of its practitioners. What contemporary painters and photographic artists have in common is an awareness that they live in an image-saturated culture, that images are highly structured, and that part of their job is the critical consideration of those structures.
THE OTHER MAJOR show is the Royal Ulster Academy (RUA) 126th Annual Exhibition at the Ormeau Baths Gallery. It is, as such annual shows always are, a mixed bag, though there is a small but sizeable proportion of work included that really doesn't make the grade on any level. As with the RHA in the South, the RUA had come to accommodate photography, something that would have been unthinkable not so long ago. In fact, photography is significant in the exhibition way and above the actual photographs included.
Time and again painters refer to photography in their work in the sense that they imitate its effects: the smooth textures and differential focus of the photographic image. Presumably they paint from photographs and reproduce what they see. It is also as if they paint photographically as a guarantee of veracity, just as many early photographers imitated painterly conventions as a guarantee that what they were doing was art.
Again as with the RHA, the RUA is changing over time. That fact that the outgoing and incoming presidents are relatively younger, forward-looking artists - Carol Graham and Rita Duffy respectively - augurs well. The senior figures have been dependably strong and still are: Basil Blackshaw imparts a fantastic liveliness to a picture surface, and other stalwarts include Catherine McWilliams, Graham Gingles, Victor Sloan, TP Flanagan, Brian Ballard and Jack Pakenham.
Among the associate members, Denise Ferran, Ros Harvey, Clement McAleer, Keith Wilson and Marcus Patton are impressive. From open selection, Natalia Black, Sara Brown, Comhghall Casey, Adele Chapman, Fionnuala D'Arcy, Colin Davis, Adam Frew, Brian Gallagher, KK Godsee, Robert Janz, Sarah Longley, Hamish Moyle, Johnny McEwan, Bernadette Madden, Trudie Mooney, Louise Peat, Jennifer Trouton, Neil C Reid are all outstanding. Paintings by Melita Denaro, an invited artist, are also striking. Michael Hanna's Romance is an extraordinary piece of work, and wildly undervalued to go by the price printed in the catalogue.
The Double Image is not about painting and photography as such, but it is telling that the dual emphasis seemed to McKenzie to be a logical way of surveying recent work by artists in Northern Ireland.
His show is the fourth in a sequence organised by the Golden Thread Gallery under the general heading Collective Histories. There may be about 12 shows in all, and the aim is to cover art in Northern Ireland from 1945 to the present day. The multiplicity of shows allows a multiplicity of viewpoints, so that no single, linear progression is mooted.
The largest piece in McKenzie's show is by Mark McGreevy, whose paintings are always busy and compendious, as though each is an entire world in itself. This is something that is possible in painting but not in photography, because a single painting can incorporate, in Steven Pinker's phrase, many different "levels of analysis" at once. McGreevy's painting is very big and commensurately ambitious. He is a capable, adventurous and consistently interesting artist.
One can see links with the work of David Crone, in a sense the quiet man of Northern Irish art: a fine painter, extremely influential as a teacher, though modest and more at home in the studio than in the limelight. As with McGreevy's painting, but in a different way, his recent work, centred on the garden, occupies an indeterminate space populated by several possible versions of the real rather than one, authoritative account. McKenzie's own work explores similar conceptual territory, examining the way layers of history underlie and are woven into the surface of the contemporary, here and now.
SO PAINTING STILL has some good cards of its own to play, but what of photography? It is striking that much of the photography included concentrates on what is not immediately visible. Daniel Jewesbury's two photographs - both under the title Joy, and the Desire which Longs for it - chart a watercourse, channelled through concrete, through a wild patch of greenery, with a seasonal jump between the images. The water leads us into the picture to the point of its disappearance in the distance.
Similarly, Mary McIntyre's Passages features a mysterious, illuminated opening in the ground in a section of park-like woodland at night. Sean Hillen and John Duncan, on the other hand, consider the construction of heritage and cultural style in their respective ways. Hillen's postcard composites are well known, and his beautifully fashioned broadsides at the heritage industry are witheringly satirical.
Duncan has charted the remaking of Belfast in his series Boom Town, looking at the destruction of one cultural archetype in favour of another and noting the artificiality of both.
The Double Image also features Eamon O'Kane, Darren Murray, Elizabeth Magill, Michael Minnis, Colin Watson, Mary Theresa Keown, Dermot Seymour, Paul Seawright, Susan MacWilliam, Dan Shipsides, Mark Orange, Peter Richards, and Hannah Starkey, making up a strong and by no means obvious ensemble. The points made here have touched on some aspects of the show, but probably makes it sound too prescriptive, which it is not. McKenzie does not set out to illustrate points but to ask questions and open up possibilities. As he notes, photography is often viewed in isolation from painting in exhibitions, right from art college degree shows onwards, and it is provocative and intriguing to see them as partners.
BELFAST EXPOSED'S CURRENT show, Portraits: Reflections on the Veil, is about "the social practices of veiling", much in the news of late. Jane Brettle exhibits two series of photographs. One features reworkings of iconic images of women by artists and photographers including Man Ray, Lee Miller and Julia Margaret Cameron. The other features photographs of women who are members of the Pakeeza Group in Edinburgh, Muslims who "are actively engaged in working to undermine myths and prejudices about the veil". In addition, a video piece, Confluence, by Tulu Bayar, obliquely if rather solemnly equates veiling with wearing wigs.
By and large, the images of the Pakeeza Group shy away from the form of veiling that generates controversy: the chador and niqab that effectively obscure everything about a person except her eyes (and that too is effected in a further elaboration of veiling). In fact, most of what we see in Portraits is surely uncontentious, except, perhaps, for those Muslims who object to the public visibility of women not wearing the chador. Brettle's reworkings of her source photographs feature figures garbed in chador and niqab, so that they are virtually obscured. One could read this in various ways: as being implicitly critical of the practice, for example. The presentation throughout is very straight-laced, even earnest, and it doesn't seem to have occurred to Brettle that there might be something comical about veiling Lee Miller et al to the point of invisibility - but there is.
The Double Image: Representing Narratives in Contemporary Northern Irish Painting and Photography, Golden Thread Gallery, The Switch Room, Belfast, until Nov 7
RUA 126th Annual Exhibition, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, Until Oct 24.
Portraits: Reflection on the Veil Jane Brettle and Tulu Bayar, Belfast Exposed Photography, Until Nov 7 048-90230965
