Innocent Landscapes: Sites of the Disappeared Photographs
David Farrell

In May 1999, The Northern Ireland Bill was passed in the House of Commons; it provided an amnesty to help the identification and location of people who had disappeared during The Troubles. Six locations were identified and became known as the ‘Sites of The Disappeared’. These were the burial places of eight people murdered by the IRA in the 1970s and early 1980s. In thirty years of conflict and atrocities, this small group of people stood apart. They were all Catholic and, as it turned out, had not only been taken from their families but also from the North to be buried in the South. In June 2000 the search was finally suspended. Three remains had been located, three closures permitted; for the remaining five families there was a site rather than a spot, a closing rather than a closure.

Born 1961 in Dublin, David Farrell has worked as a freelance photographer since 1990, contributing amongst others to The Sunday Business Post, The Observer magazine and the Telegraph magazine. He also teaches photography.

Dewi Lewis Publishing is a partnership owned and run by Caroline Warhurst and Dewi Lewis.

Founded in 1994, its photography list has an international reputation and has included books by leading British and international photographers such as Laia Abril, William Klein, Martin Parr, Simon Norfolk, Fay Godwin, Tom Wood, Sergio Larrain, Frank Horvat, John Blakemore, Paolo Pelegrin, Simon Roberts and Bruce Gilden. The aim of the company is to bring to the attention of a wider public, accessible but challenging contemporary photography by both established and lesser known practitioners. The company has a worldwide distribution network and is recognised as one of the leading photographic publishers in the world. It publishes around 20 new titles each year. Dewi Lewis Publishing also works in close collaboration with a number of European publishers and was a founding member of The European Publishers Award for Photography, which ran from 1994 to 2016. In 2014 Dewi Lewis Publishing received the PHotoEspana’s prize for Outstanding Publishing House of the Year.

Caroline Warhurst has been involved in the company for most of its 25 year history. Her father and grandfather, both known as Bill Warhurst, were, for many decades, press photographers with The Times, London. Caroline began working in photography at Manchester Studies Photography Archive, where in addition to her role as a researcher she also programmed a photographic gallery at Manchester Polytechnic. As a key member of The Documentary Photography Archive she was involved in the commissioning of several contemporary photographers including Martin Parr, Clement Cooper and John Darwell. In the early 1990s she set up Photofile, a company publishing photographic postcards and greetings cards.

Before establishing the imprint, Dewi Lewis was the founding Director of Cornerhouse, one of the major UK Centres for Contemporary Visual Arts and Film, based in Manchester. In 1987 he established Cornerhouse Publications which achieved recognition internationally for its ambitious and imaginative publishing programme and was a winner of the Sunday Times Award for Small Publisher of the Year. Many of the titles published by the company have been shortlisted for a range of international prizes and several have won awards. Dewi’s own book entitled Publishing Photography was selected by Photo-eye (USA) as the Best Photography Resource Book of the Year.

Dewi Lewis was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 2004 and in November 2009 he was awarded the inaugural Royal Photographic Society Award for Outstanding Services to Photography. He was awarded the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing at the World Photography Awards in April 2012.

In 2018 the company won both the Paris Photo / Aperture Foundation Photobook of The Year Award and the Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Prize. ²