Description

‘It all starts with a beer in the wrong pub, where no one enters who is not known and family’.

Thus, Erik Messori establishes the first contact with the Irish irredentists, some still in hiding, and succeeds, in time, not without effort and courage, in gaining their trust to the point of being able to portray them.

The result is a book that recounts the essence of a battle set aside, but not dead. The strength, and also the violence, of a struggle animated by aspirations still unsatisfied by a truce that fails to be a peace. The historical story of the IRA, apparently archived lives on without the violent outcomes of past decades. Urban landscapes without human figures and faceless bodies: in these photographs by Erik Messori, it is not the portrayed men and women or the Irish walls and streets that speak, but the words themselves and the drawings on the tattoos and murals. Weapons and flags, signs and emblems, words and names written in Gaelic, maps of Ireland and faces of lost family members and friends, of historical or iconic figures construct, each in their own right, an emotional story, beyond the chronicle, made all the more powerful by the alienating distance imposed by black and white.

These rough shots, often taken in a short time, with an improvised construction of the pose or setting, do not grant distance to the viewer. They impose a close, shocking presence: we are called upon to get involved, with no filter or way out. We are with our backs to the wall, we cannot distract our gaze. So let us rummage through these stories written in emblems, drawings, single words or short phrases, promises of love, and dates of death. It is impossible, even useless, to reconstruct even a single one of these personal stories, while they emerge, photograph after photograph, in a collective dimension, their meaning, their strength, the plot that united these people for several decades in Northern Ireland’s struggle for independence from Great Britain. Alongside the ostentation of arms and the display of faith in violence, there appear the Celtic leprechauns and crosses, the shamrock of the missionary St. Patrick, the symbol of the divine Trinity, the harp of the Benedictine monks, the emblem of Ireland that opposed the English invasion in the 13th century. There are references to other similar battles, such as those of Scotland or the Native Americans, to revolutionary icons such as Che Guevara; one recognizes the face of Bobby Sands who took his hunger strike to the extreme, allowing himself to die in prison in 1981. There are religious sentences (Only God can judge me) or battle sentences (Better to die on your feet than live on your knees). Then there are the death dates of comrades or husbands or sons who died in the struggle for independence, right up to the extreme case of the cover photograph, in which the back of the man portrayed is a mausoleum for those who fell in the struggle.