War photographer Richard Wayman shifts his focus from Afghanistan to Co Donegal in a new exhibition. Siofra O'Donovan reports
What would a war photographer be doing at the Ardara Show in Co Donegal? Taking photographs, of course: of competitors showing their cattle, beetroot, parsley, cakes and jam, of judges picking the show's best heifer and best hand-cut piece of turf. "People take it very seriously," says the photographer Richard Wayman. "It's a big event for them, but I've never seen anything like it before in my life."
That's something coming from an award-winning photographer who has visited 42 countries in the past 10 years. His eyes have seen a lot, but something has called Wayman away from the vaguely seedy competitiveness of London photojournalism, away from the war-torn countries he had dedicated his life to documenting, to the town in south-west Co Donegal.
Ardara Portraits 2001-2003, his show at Ardara Artists' Resource Centre, was conceived for Earagail Arts Festival. It was a marked departure from his first exhibition for the festival in 2001, The Kurds: A Nation without A State. Wayman had been very taken with the town, so when the centre asked him to document its people in photographs, he agreed.
"I feel at home here," he says. "In London, people put themselves through three hours on a tube to get money to buy their DVD player or their BMW, but here people have time to talk on the street. I can walk in to Nancy's or the Corner House and, without arranging to meet anyone, drift into conversation with people I have never met before."
His photographs - of Cyrille, the French restaurateur, preparing salmon; of Pat McGrath, the hardware merchant, displaying his boxes of nails; of men bringing turf home from the bog; of men sorting the oyster beds on Leconnel Strand; of Tommy Feeny chatting with the bin collectors as the sun rises behind them - have none of the condescending sentimentality of which rural portraiture so often reeks. They are frank but subtle images of men and women in their daily lives, greeting each other in the street, working quietly in each other's shadows.
They seem a far cry from his award-winning images in Time, Newsweek and National Geographic, and those that appear regularly in the Guardian, the London Times and the Independent. So how do they compare to his previous work?
Wayman spent 10 years with the Kurds - who are classified by the Turkish government as "mountain Turks" - after leaving London College of Printing. His Kurdish reportage was his attempt to give dignity to a distinctive people whose human rights had been bypassed. When he arrived in 1987, the Kurds had formed the Kurdistan Workers' Party, whose fighters he stayed with.
"Every time I went back, someone else I knew was dead. What papers carry this news? In photography, you are successful if you are in advertising or the paparazzi waiting outside nightclubs and restaurants for the right celebrity to arrive, not documenting the lives of the dispossessed."
Although he braved the perils of shells and mortar rounds, Wayman's Kurdish photographs are not about the violence the struggle involves but about the spaces in between: children rummaging through rubble, fighters taking a cigarette break, their guns leaning on the wall behind them, a group of men playing backgammon, enshrouded in smoke. These photographs speak quietly of their dispossession. They are the work of a sensitive eye and a compassionate heart, poetic compared with war-junkie photography.
When the Turks beat him and took his film, he would say he had to be at the British embassy by 5 p.m.
"At the end of the day, I was an Englishman, and they were afraid of that. They weren't going to kill me, but they'd kill a Kurd like a shot."
Wayman gives us something real, unfiltered by the mass media. He claims, however, despite his work in Bosnia, Israel, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, that he is not a war photographer at heart.
His Kurdish refugee friends in London have gone home since Saddam Hussein was deposed - not that that justified the Iraqi war, says Wayman, who points out that the US put him there in the first place.
Although Wayman is moving away from war photography, he is not apathetic about war, nor about mongers of it. He has much to say about US foreign policy, having seen its effects.
Essentially, he says, it is very simple: Tony Blair and George Bush are not Christians. Anyone who blithely breaks the First Commandment cannot be. He believes the result of such reckless foreign policies could be apocalyptic.
"If the US hadn't got involved in the Middle East to exploit resources, bin Laden wouldn't have done the towers," he says. When a friend and fellow photographer called Gary Trotter phoned him after September 11th, Wayman was having a pint. Trotter asked him where he was. Nancy's, Wayman told him, in Ardara. Trotter told him he was crazy: war was pending in Afghanistan. Do you really think I'm the crazy one, Wayman asked him, then switched off his phone.
"I don't want to cover war any more. I don't want to be obsessed with whether my image of suffering will sell, fly out to a war scene and get drunk on the plane coming home. That's bad for your karma. I'm interested in communities. In Ardara, there is a spirit of co-operation between people, which is what I wanted to capture."
And he still hasn't left Ardara. "I've never been interested in cars," he says as a tractor rolls past.
Ardara Portraits 2001-2003 is at Ardara Artists' Resource Centre, Co Donegal, untilAugust 24th
