The portraits in this book were produced using advanced facial recognition technology that’s being used in most cities around the world, developed by engineers in Moscow from existing systems built to recognize car plates. These so called ‘non-collaborative portraits’ are more three dimensional data maps than photographs, where no human contact is registered: there’s a total negation of humanity, they’re essentially some sort of digital death masks. Broomberg & Chanarin have constructed their own taxonomy of portraits in contemporary Russia, including Pussy Riot members and other Moscow citizens.
The Belfast Exposed Archive occupies a small room on the first floor at 23 Donegal Street and contains over 14,000 black-and-white contact sheets, documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland. These are photographs taken by professional photo-journalists and ‘civilian’ photographers, chronicling protests, funerals and acts of terrorism as well as the more ordinary stuff of life: drinking tea; kissing girls; watching trains.
The marks on the surface of the contact strips – across the image itself – allude to the presence of many visitors. These include successive archivists, who have ordered, catalogued and re-catalogued this jumble of images. For many years the archive was also made available to members of the public, and sometimes they would deface their own image with a marker pen, ink or scissors. So, in addition to the marks made by generations of archivists, photo editors, legal aides and activists, the traces of these very personal obliterations are also visible. They are the gestures of those who wished to remain anonymous.
We would like to acknowledge and thank the original photographers Mervyn Smyth, Sean Mc Kernan, Gerry Casey, Seamus Loughran and all other contributing photographers to Belfast Exposed’s archive.