Tribe, the unmissable collection of photographs by Galway film-maker Pat Comer, was one of the incidental hits of the recent Volvo Ocean Race extravaganza. The series of images that Comer has pasted on to dark gables and derelict walls in and around the Galway docks work so well that the waterfront is going to look terribly bare when the exhibition eventually ends.
"It was just meant as a bit of fun," says Comer, pictured right, in front of one of the images. "I have always worked with images and I wouldn't class myself as a photographer - I probably broke all the rules in blowing these photographs up - but I am very interested in it, and the idea was to have a bit of fun with art. The two don't often go hand in hand."
The photographs are a selection from more than 10 years of taking pictures, and once Comer got the idea of placing them on oblique, background walls, he began to see Galway in an entirely new light. "I had been walking these streets for most of my life, but suddenly I started seeing all this potential in walls I had never noticed before."
He was not sure if it would be possible to paste the images on to rough walls, or if they would withstand the notorious summer showers that sweep in from the west coast, but the photographs have been both resilient and hugely popular. Comer has lost count of the number of people claiming to be the swimmer taking shelter during a storm at Blackrock. "But I knew who it was. I was down there and he came around the corner out of nowhere, a New Zealander."
Now, whether the traveller knows it or not, his swim on a wild afternoon is memorialised in a spectacular black-and-white blow-up at the Spanish Arch end of the docks. The exhibition was planned to feature during the Volvo Ocean Race, but the photographs can still be seen now that the boats have gone. It would be nice if they were permanent features, but Comer is not sure. "They would never last the winter," he says.
