Association by Brian Newman, signed copy

Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to announce the publication of Brian Newman’s new book Association, a long-term study of Orange Order Lodges across Ireland’s border counties. 

From ORANGE HALLS ALONG THE BORDER by Colin Graham

Royal Irish Academy, March 2024

 “Newman’s photographic approach to the Orange Order is intimate and empathetically analytical. He does not intrude or interpret. He offers up a close (but not close-up) portrait of an institution. His photographic style sits between art photography and documentary photography in a way that has a clear lineage in recent decades in Northern Ireland.

It is a mode of photography that allows for a long, slow look at things, and in which the physical textures of objects, landscapes and materials become meaningful.

Most obviously, this is undramatic photography.

We might think of the Orange Order primarily through its parades—public, colourful, performative acts of celebration and heritage, or triumphalism and intimidation, depending on one’s viewpoint. In Newman’s work the colour and bombast have been drained, so that the images are dominated by the grey and the drab—the concrete of the car park, the rendering on the wall, the industrial steel of the shipping container. And the lines where these dullness’s meet draw the eye to the banal”

– Colin Graham

https://www.ria.ie/blog/orange-halls-along-the-border-brian-newmans-association-and-the-quandary-of-unionism/

Colin Graham is Professor of English at Maynooth University and author of Northern Ireland: Thirty Years of Photography (2013).

ASSOCIATION is Published by Photo Museum Ireland

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