Source
Summer 2015

It is a common occurrence to encounter a familiar photograph in an unexpected setting. If we had time to think about it we might ask how different it was from the way we had seen the picture before. How much do we know about the circumstances in which a picture was made and first published anyway? What difference does this context make to the way we understand a photograph? Does a photojournalistic image retain much of the encounter that created it once 50 years have passed and it has become an album cover or a fridge magnet? Ian Walker had just such an encounter with a Don McCullin photograph and has retraced the the steps of the photograph and its photographer to answer these questions.

Helio Leon has worked in a number of cities: Cuenca, Kansas City, Barcelona, Istanbul and Cork, where he is currently based. Across those locations, driven by a boredom with ‘society’s conventions about social interaction, gender and intimacy’ we see the photographer engaged in a process of mapping out a personal ‘carnal underworld’. Important in the work is Leon’s own sense of vulnerability of ‘letting everything in, giving myself and my body to others and to the situation, while at the same time never completely, always ready to run away’.

After university, Holly Buckle worked in a textiles department as a fabric cutter. While there she developed an obsession with materials and materiality and started making work using scrap bits of PVC and Spandex. Chance, experimentation, subconscious drives all inform the creation of her worlds of possibility and fantasy.

Sissel Thastum’s I am here when you are here is a personal and collaborative project between mother and daughter made at home over a four-year period. The Nordic landscape provides the location for the portraits and a relationship with nature that they both see as a ‘connection to something uncensored and real, that allows you to be yourself.’ Writing about the work Nessa O’Mahony notes the importance of the ‘intimacy and trust between artist and subject’ and the photographer’s ability to ‘avoid the trap of domesticity’.

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