Source
Autumn 2013

This August the Getty Museum published a blog post entitled ‘Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come’ announcing that they were going to make 4,600 high-resolution images available on their website for free with a promise to make more images available in the future. They joined other Museums like the Los Angeles County Museum and the Rijksmuseum in apparently similar moves to give away high-quality digital versions of pictures. Nick Galvin examines what is involved in public collections making images available in this way. What is the best approach for the public, for the collection and for the museum? Is ‘open access’ simply an unqualified public good or do other considerations have to be taken into account when distribution images owned by public institutions?

We put an emphasis on heading out across the country to meet photographers directly. In 2012 on a research trip to Cork we had hoped to talk to the photographer Alex Rose. In the end it didn’t happen but we remained intrigued by an artist based in Cork who was only making his work available via galleries in Beverly Hills and New York. Matt Packer introduces the work of this elusive Irish artist in whose collages ‘the human body (the adolescent body in particular) is a site of traumatic expression’.

Danny Treacy’s work Those is part of an ongoing project where he gathers, disassembles and then re-forms clothing – clothing found in neglected spaces or ‘fertile grounds’ – to mimic organic life forms. ‘I gravitate towards graveyards, woodland, car-parks, the banks of tidal rivers, underpasses, wasteland, clearings; spaces that are united in their ambiguity, all used by humans, but not as they were intended to be used – rich with the fallout from the human animal.’

Gareth McConnell first went to Ibiza in 1993, searching for the Balearic dream, in his own personal ‘summer of love’. He left six weeks later with no money, no shoes and no passport. He returned repeatedly between 2002 and 2012 to photograph young people who had come to the island, like him, to indulge in its hedonistic life. But instead of making images of the never ending party he, as Francis Halsall describes it, “…shows us what’s left over when the PA goes quiet, the lights go up and the drugs wear off”.

Source is a quarterly photography magazine, available in print and as a digital edition, published in Belfast, Northern Ireland. They publish emerging photographic work and engage with the latest in contemporary photography through news, thoughtful features and reviews of the latest exhibitions and books from Ireland and the UK. Their website brings together an archive of writing and pictures from the magazine alongside current features.[/note]https://www.source.ie/main/about.php ¹