I'd like to review our trip looking back through the thousand-odd photographs and three hours of videotape I shot.
We arrived at Cork airport about an hour behind schedule. As my only prior experience of Europe has been in winter, the most surprising thing for me was how light it was. By my watch it was already past nine in the evening. But the nights are longer during winter, so the total annual exposure to daylight will be the same everywhere, I reflected. It was with these thoughts that I stepped onto Irish soil. The encounters and impressions waiting there for me were greater than I had imagined. This was entirely due to the extensive contacts set up for us in advance of my trip by the secretariat staff, for which I am very grateful.
Cork, Day 1. An early breakfast, then into the city. Cars drive on the left, just like in Japan, so it's very easy to walk through. With almost no tall buildings, the sky seems vast. And everywhere in that vast sky cranes are at work, reaching higher than the churches. Lowering my eyes, I see houses being torn down, empty lots, buildings going up. A passage comes to mind from the "By the Way" collection of photography by Dara McGrath, whom we are to meet tomorrow. Down a hill we come upon a river. Across the river we see the Salgado banner. This is advertising the photography exhibition that has opened at Triskel, the gallery that we are scheduled to visit tomorrow. This brand-new gallery, now some four-fifths complete, offers its visitors an orderly array of 100 or so framed photographs depicting poverty and famine, the scars of war in the world of Salgado. Just as at the Tokyo show the year before last. At the
Cork Vision Center we come across an exhibition of originals of contemporary Polish posters. Provocative color and design burn themselves into my brain. The town is full of orange banners and posters for Cork 2005. By chance we find a Cork 2005 information center, which provides us with plenty of information on galleries. We then enjoy a long afternoon making the rounds of the galleries and getting ourselves lost in the process.
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| Saito (left) with Dara McGrat |
Cork, Day 2. At nine ofclock our interpreter Yoshiko Kogi arrives from London. She studies photography and so all goes smoothly though we have never met before. Eleven ofclock. Mr. McGrath arrives, the photographer whofs agreed to do the workshop. We go straight into conference. We agree on wanting to make the workshop as excellent, significant and effective as we can, so the discussion proceeds at a faster pace than we had expected. Talking of recent developments in photography, we spend several hours in discussion, then he takes us to meet Ms. Emma Johnston of the Triskel gallery and over lunch she tells us about running the gallery and provides information on the current exhibition. Afterwards, Fiona Kearney, director of the Glucksman Gallery at Cork University, takes time from her busy preparations to show us the "Through the Looking Glass" show, the first ever exchange exhibit
with Northern Ireland, that opens tomorrow. We shoot a video message from Ms. Kearney to Mr. David Farrell, the photographer we are to meet tomorrow in Dublin who has work in this exhibition.
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| Fiona Kearney (2nd from left) shows us her gallery's exhibition |
A meeting at the Triskel gallery |
Dublin, Day 1. Our final day in Ireland. At ten o'clock we meet Mr. Farrell, the photographer who has agreed to do a workshop in Morioka in December. We show him the video message from Ms. Kearney and discuss the state of photography education in Ireland and about working in Germany and the United States. He then takes us on a tour of Temple Bar: to the National Library of Ireland, to the Gallery of Photography, to the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios. At the Gallery of Photography we gained special admittance to the rental darkroom and the digital room below ground there. That evening we discussed contemporary photography with Mr. Liam, a photographer who teaches middle school, high school and university photography courses in Dublin.
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| Viewing the video message from Fiona Kearney. David Farrel at right |
Visiting Ireland and meeting with artists who work in that country renewed my awareness that the environment encompassing our world and human minds are positively undergoing change and that I cannot feel that all of this is turning out well for the human race.
And though their subjects differ, photographers continue to capture this and show their work. How we live, scenery, children, war, poverty, all the rest . . .
I broke out in gooseflesh looking at the work in "Through the Looking Glass",the exhibition of photography whose subjects are exclusively reality and children and the first joint art show for Ireland and Northern Ireland. This visit to Ireland brought to my attention that the multiple psychological structure of human beings by which we look at our selves with other selves is in fact a problem in itself, an insight that will have a major impact on how I live my life from here on out. |
