Bigfoot in West Belfast

About the exhibition

Bigfoot in West Belfast, which followed a postgraduate symposium on the subject of 'Photography and Lived Experience', was an outcome of Dr Liam Devlin's reflections on his early life growing up with the conflict in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition foregrounded the significance of personal experiences and collective imagination in how we remember the past, and their relationship to media representations of historical events. Its video montage and wall text intertwined the aesthetics of photojournalism - the documentary evidence of the past upon which we so often base our understanding of past events - with more subjective and imaginative interpretations of a remembered past. In doing so it asked viewers to question what they see, and to critically re-engage with authoritative representations of history and reality.

About the researcher

Dr Liam Devlin researchs contemporary documentary photography and art practices, The Photobook, and histories and philosophies of photography, to explore how photographic images are used and/or reused in socially engaged art practices as a catalyst for debate. He is currently Director for internationalisation in the School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Huddersfield. Prior to this he taught at The University of South Wales, University of Brighton and Goldsmiths University, London.