Invisible Cities: Mist; Interior II; Untitled (woman)

Artist Paul Seawright (b. Belfast 1965)

Date2005

MediumLightjet print on fuji crystal paper, mounted on aluminium

DimensionsFramed (Each): 127 x 152.4 cm

ClassificationsPhotographs

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Purchased, 2006. © Paul Seawright.

Object number2001

DescriptionThe fastest growing cities in the world are on the African continent. By 2015 Lagos will have become the world's second largest city. Urban Africa remains hidden in the blind spot of the West, obscured by larger, more urgent issues like the Aids pandemic and persistent rural famine. These photographs from Lagos [as well as others in the series of Johannesburg, Lusaka and Addis Ababa] present a glimpse into the unplanned settlements on the peripheries of these now great cities on the African continent, settlements that are cities in their own right, often larger than the metropolises out of which they have come. Typically Seawrights works provide little context and avoid comfortable narrative. The photographs mimic our uneasiness with the subject of Africa or more generally the Urban poor. They simultaneously describe in detail and refuse the kind of detailed decription that often leads to cliched and reductive editorial comment. As we move between anxious interiors and the perilous fringes of city landscapes, we repeatedly encounter an occluded frame - reminiscent of Seawright's Belfast, tense, troubled and stubbornly resistant to analysis. (Kerlin Gallery)

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