My Days in Troubled Ireland by Kaveh Kazemi

Description

My Days in Troubled Ireland by Kaveh Kazemi (Foreword by Paul Clements)

Year: 2019
Format: Hardcover
Size: 220 x 290 mm
Pages: 144 pp
Language: English
Published by: Nazar Art Publication
ISBN: 9786001523007

The renowned photographer Kaveh Kazemi has documented the scars of a turbulent past in a new book of images of Ireland. His dramatic photographs portray a place of division and sectarianism during some of the worst years of conflict in the 1980s and reflect the first Christmas of peace in 1994.

This important book will rekindle memories of a painful past and the four-decade deployment of British troops on the streets of Northern Ireland which saw the longest ever campaign in the history of the British Army. It comes at a significant moment with the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of what became known as ‘The Troubles’, which claimed the lives of more than 3,500 people.

Kaveh Kazemi got his start in 1979 by covering the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, but in 1984 he decided to leave his homeland and expand his career as a photojournalist. For his first self-commissioned assignment abroad, he chose Northern Ireland. Diving into the heart of Belfast during the Troubles, Kazemi was able to link up with key IRA contacts and photograph the conflicted neighbourhoods, marches, scores of murals, and British military patrols and checkpoints that set the tone during the turbulent 1980s in the region called Ulster. His keen eye for detail against this backdrop of violence now serves as a reminder of a painful past in this collection of photographs.

Patrolling British soldiers pass a memorial to IRA hunger strikers in the region known as ‘Bandit Country’. The main movement of the army in this area was by air due to the risk of being targeted by the IRA, Crossmaglen, South Armagh, 1985, by kaveh kazemi

British soldiers foot patrol a Catholic area behind Falls Road, West Belfast, 1985, by Kaveh Kazemi

These pictures portray a troubled place of sectarianism, somewhere with a diversity viewpoints where people were not afraid to be outspoken. Moody and evocative, they show a passing British army foot patrol or armed IRA volunteers at a ‘training’ camp in the countryside. We should be reminded of what we lived through and these brave and unflinching images by Kaveh Kazemi hold up a powerful mirror to that time.

– Paul Clements, former BBC journalist based in Belfast and now a travel writer.