On the walls in Belfast - various photographers, various galleries, Belfast, Northern Ireland

With fall in Belfast comes the annual Belfast Festival, an international cornucopia of the arts that extends throughout the winter months. This past season was particularly rich in photography. The images usually associated with Ulster come from newspaper articles reporting sectarian violence, giving the impression that current politics may dominate artists' work. Artists and viewers in Belfast, like anywhere, areas interested in the politics of the modern condition as they are in their culture's political situation.

Belfast Exposed, founded in 1983, is a space devoted to promoting the work of local photographers. It has darkroom facilities and its staff offers technical assistance and professional advice. Located at one end of the Falls Road, a part of town devoted mainly to taxi stands and parking lots, the gallery is a tiny space with a sign on the door that reads "This is a neutral venue, please leave your politics at the front door." Deviating from their regular exhibition policy Belfast Exposed exhibited "Women to Women," 50 photographs by American Eve Arnold that had traveled from The Gallery of Photography in Dublin. These photographs are devoted to events in women's lives and range in subject and date from Lesbian Wedding, England (1965) to Permanent Wave, China (1979). Kwashiorkor, S. Africa (1973) poignantly portrays a starving child with its mother. The dignity of her subjects and Arnold's apparent ease with them make these documentary works more like compassionate and compelling stories.

In November the Ormeau Baths Gallery (OBG), Belfast's major contemporary art venue, showed David Byrne's cibachromes series, "Strange Rituals and Sleepless Nights," which brought a sense of deja vu to any viewer familiar with the icons of twentieth-century art. Byrne's photographs of stacked consumer goods remind one of Warhol screenprints (as the gallery blurb indicates) but not in an enlightening way. Byrne's repetitive images of hotel ceilings in tones of orange and green and walls in purple ate silent and banal. During his extensive travels Byrne has photographed many "exotic" sights including vending machines covered in a riot of Asian characters and kitschy plaster mountains and colored rock formations in Tokyo. Byrne seems to be using these images in a purely decorative way and the lack of human forms within them further accentuates their ultimate emptiness.

In December and January, Henri Cartier-Bresson's predictably brilliant "Tete a Tete" filled the OBG with a selection of portraits depicting the intellectual, artistic and political luminaries of Europe and the United States, many famously definitive of their subjects - Colette and her Companion Pauline (1952) being just one example. Not only does Cartier-Bresson capture the elusive moment of revelatory character, but the tonal qualities and compositions make the images satisfying to look at repeatedly, even when the subject may be unknown to the viewer.

The Old Museum Arts Centre showcased several artists who work in Northern Ireland and in the Republic. Peter Richards's exhibition "Camera Lucida" was a fine example of how an artist can use photography to document their work while simultaneously making an interesting photograph. Richards uses a huge, disposable, cardboard camera lucida to record his performance pieces. He prefers to dismantle and discard each camera after use and build another one at the next location. He constructs a camera from the materials available at each site (in one case a large tent) and asks the audience to choose an image from books on performance art that he brings with him. Richards then reconstructs the illustrated performance pieces with his audience in costumes that he provides and uses the camera lucida to record a specific moment of the piece. The exposure time is about 10 minutes, so if people enter the frame halfway through they appear as ghostly presences in the final photograph. When I viewed the installation, the camera lucida took up nearly the entire exhibition space and Richards was busy making a group photograph of the gallery employees. He views his works as "performances/documentations" and will show the finished print to his audience for feedback as part of the process. Because colors appear as opposites when using the camera lucida, he has begun experimenting with the colors worn by people in the performances to obtain different effects. Richards's images, almost life-sized, convey immediacy, as if the people in them were alive, breathing just behind the photographic paper, their performances ongoing.

Mary McIntyre, whose work was also at the Old Museum Arts Centre, exhibited two light-box photographs entitled "Chambers." One 6 x 4 foot photograph was on the back wall of the small gallery space and depicted an empty council chamber. The other, only 12 x 10 inches, was hung near the exit from the gallery space and depicted the exit of the council chamber. The room was painted dark blue and was unlit except for the light from behind the boxes illuminating the photographs. Viewers entered the room from around the side of a large false wall blocking the main photograph from view, as if one is entering the space of the photograph. The dark blue of the gallery walls extends the space of the photograph by echoing the color of the velvet curtains that hang behind a horseshoe-shaped table, complete with worn yet grand leather chairs. Textures and colors became emphasized by the dark gallery. While a critique of authority and the judicial system was implicit in the choice of subject matter, the image itself failed to impose its presence. The small photograph, relative to the huge table, did succeed in giving a clever, Alice in Wonderland feeling of needing to escape a confining space if even through a smaller one.