An iconic project made at the height of the ‘Troubles’, Troubled Land deals with
the small but insistent signs of political division embedded in the landscape of
Northern Ireland. At the heart of the Irish conflict lays the land — who owns
it, who controls it, whose history it expresses. Paul Graham’s quietly radical
book keeps this material truth in mind as it uniquely combines landscape and
conflict photography, seducing us with bucolic views in which telling details
only gradually appear: painted kerbs, distant soldiers or helicopters, flags and
graffiti, paint-splattered roads, each tacitly aligning that location to its
Republican or Loyalist allegiance. Pastoral photographs of green fields and
hedgerows reveal themselves to be images of conflict and dispute — despite the
steadiness of the photographic frame and the clarity of Graham’s vision, this is
unsettled land. Originally published in 1986, Troubled Land is reprinted here
for the first time in thirty-five years. Controversial then for its use of
colour and refusal to follow the clichéd tropes of photojournalism, the book was
pivotal in providing a fresh perspective on Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ and
left a lasting impact on landscape photography, suggesting how it might engage
with politics and society rather than escape from them. Together with A1 – The
Great North Road and Beyond Caring, it completes a new edition of the remarkable
trilogy of books Graham made in 1980s UK.
