Love's Fire Song, Enda Bowe

Belfast is a city segregated and divided: its so-called peace walls , built to separate Unionist and Nationalist communities, are taller in places even than the Berlin Wall. For his project, Love's Fire Song, Enda photographed youth culture on either side of the peace walls, choosing the symbolic bonfires of the 12th July and 8th August as his starting point. Rather than the expected images, laden with political and religious imagery, he concentrated on the ordinary, the everyday. The photographs are shown as a coherent series, using a muted colour palette with only subtle symbolisms, and without reference to the specific locations they were taken. Free from political and geographical context, the photographs speak of longing, yearning, aspirations and vulnerabilities of young people in Belfast today; their myriad joys and sorrows; lingering on the moments that can resonate with us all, independent of our individual backgrounds and inherited place and beliefs.

Enda Bowe is a photographer whose work explores cinematic narratives — blending documentary and staged photography to trace the physical and psychological landscapes of the everyday. His photographs move between the urban and suburban, the personal and universal, creating emotionally charged portraits and quiet visual stories.

Published by Blue Swallow
Softcover
Signed by the artist
30 pages
250 x 330 mm