There are no people in Paul Seawright's new photographs. Perhaps that's not surprising because, though every image depicts somewhere in or on the outskirts of a city, they are generally the kind of places you'd go out of your way to avoid. Places such as the dark concrete cave beneath an overpass, or strips of ground beside railway tracks, or desolate corners at the back of blank, anonymous buildings as big and forbidding as fortresses. They are, as he says, the kind of "incredibly malevolent" spaces that you will find in every contemporary western city, the gaps between the clean lines of planners' drawings and workaday reality.
These brutal, inhuman environments are portrayed in huge colour prints. Seawright eschews conventional pictorial structure, preferring either confrontational, head-on views or fragmentary, jarring, disorientating angles. All in all it is, as he puts it "quite a heavy show, not easy". And yet, perhaps more than he realises, there is also a metaphorical richness and a tough, paradoxical beauty to many of his images, most obviously in an image that captures the golden glow of sunlight on an impassive, weathered wall of massed concrete, or the sensitive lines of a bare sapling struggling to survive in barren ground.
These photographs are in some respects strikingly similar, and in others significantly different, from his first mature body of work, known as the Sectarian Murder series, a group of photographs-with-texts made while he was studying at West Surrey College of Art and Design in the late 1980s. He didn't invent the title himself, but it is accurately descriptive of what the series is about. Working from diary entries noting current events made when he was growing up in Belfast, he researched a number of sectarian killings that occurred during an upsurge in violence in the early 1970s, and visited the locations where the bodies of the victims had been discovered, locations which sometimes coincided with the sites of the killings.
In each case a photograph of the scene is accompanied by a brief description of the grisly events. Stripped of context - and religious identity - the murders seem all the more horrible and pointless. The curious combination of distance and engagement that characterises the work is typical of Seawright and perhaps derives from his ambivalent attitude to Northern Ireland. You get the sense that, like many of his generation, he didn't want to become literally bogged down in the North and Northern politics but that, as a photographic artist with, as he put it "a moral view about photography", he felt drawn to address the world around him.
As a result, he has completed several ambitious projects in the North, including Police Force, during which he was afforded unprecedented access to the day-today working of the RUC, Orange Order, a kind of personal re-evaluation of his childhood perceptions of the marching season, and work based around the Peace Line in Belfast, "broadly to do with territory", including powerful images of grim, defensive urban environments, some of which featured in his shortlist exhibition when he won the Glen Dimplex Artist's Award in 1997.
Whereas some of his earlier images are specific in terms of time, place and incident, the recent ones are deliberately nonspecific on all counts. "It's not important that places are named. The point is that they are all similar kinds of spaces that you could find in any European city."
In fact, many of the locations are in Paris. "It started in Paris." There on a grant from the City of Paris: "I was looking at places around the peripherique, the ring road. Because the ground was earmarked for the peripherique, it was always what they called `terrain vague', a kind of non-land. I suppose it's related to the work I did on the Peace Line, that no-man's-land quality.
"A few times while I was working I ran into police patrols, who were curious about what I was doing. When I got talking to them they said that those were the places they'd go to look if anyone was reported missing." He points to one image, of a strip of dead vegetation, with a scattering of litter, beside a blank concrete embankment. "Why would anyone go there? There's nothing. Yet look at the way the ground is trampled. People have been there." This line of speculation follows on from his last project The Missing, which searched out the paths "of people who choose to disappear."
Once he knew the kind of places he was looking for, he went hunting for them in Britain as well, sometimes enlisting the help of the police. There are images in the show from Bradford, Liverpool and Cardiff. In finding them, his own discomfort was one barometer of their suitability. "It's partly about forcing people to look at places they would normally avoid. And when I'm there I'm uneasy. I think that translates into the images: they're partly pictures about anxiety."
Researching the project, he trawled newspaper files to check where the bodies of murder victims had been recovered. "I discovered the myth of the shallow grave in the forest is actually true. Bodies are often found covered over in forests, close to cities, and rarely far from a road. Taking these photographs I could see why. Standing around at 3 a.m. in a lay-by, I was entirely alone. Not a single car passed by. I started thinking: if you wanted to bury a body, it would be easy."
After studying in England, he moved back to Belfast and worked at the Art College. Then, in 1994, he moved to the University of Wales at Newport, initially as an M.A. course leader, then as head of research. Given that he had established his reputation with work relating to the North, moving away might be seen as taking a chance professionally, but he doesn't see his work as inextricably bound to Northern issues.
"I think living in Ireland in a way it was too easy to make work. Northern Ireland doesn't have the monopoly on that kind of subject matter. Malevolent things happen everywhere. Even going to study in England was good. It was one step away and I could loosen up. Of course it wasn't easy. For the first couple of years I was thinking: what will I work on here? But gradually I stopped thinking in a way that was so geographically specific.
"At first it's always difficult. When I was in Paris I thought for the first month that I'd made a mistake. Then you start to figure things out. I was looking at Atget's photographs of the city, those extraordinary images with no one in them. I think it was Walter Benjamin who said that Atget photographed Paris like a crime scene, but then every space in a city is a crime scene."
Paul Seawright's photographs can be seen at the Kerlin Gallery until October 9th
