Sam Irons - scion of the acting family - spent eight days walking along the West Bank's 'separation fence', which divides Jewish and Arabic areas. The photographs he took make up his first solo exhibition, writes Larry Ryan
How do you photograph a wall? It's not as silly a question as it sounds - especially if you're talking about the "separation fence" that Israel has built through the West Bank. Snaking more than 700km between Jewish and Arab areas, and bordered by ditches and barbed wire, it keeps out suicide bombers, according to the Israeli government. Ask Palestinians about the barrier, which for some stretches consists of eight-metre-tall concrete slabs, and they're more likely to say that it limits their freedom, shuts them off from medical care, stops them from getting to work and deprives them of their land. So when Sam Irons, the 27-year-old photographer son of the actors Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack, spent eight days following the wall through the West Bank, he had to work out what it signified and what his images would say about it.
At first, he says, he intended to photograph the barrier as a physical object. "I had been interested in walls in a metaphorical, psychological sense - of barriers, exclusion," he says. "I naively thought I could divorce the materiality of the wall from the political aspect behind it, but as soon as you even mention the wall, or point a camera at the wall, it's immediately political."
He also realised that concentrating on the artistry of his images might be inappropriate. "I became very conscious of the egotism inherent in trying to create an artwork, which is almost pointless in the face of something that is a much bigger issue than anything I can ever create."
Irons's solution was to create spare, pared-down images, "making as little personal comment myself as possible", he says. "It was nonpersonal from my point of view, and the photos are quite impersonal, because there's no one in them."
Looking at the photographs (which will be on show at Monster Truck art gallery in Dublin in the final week of May, as Irons's first solo exhibition), you might say that their bareness accentuates the inhumanity of the wall - so leading back to the inevitable political angle. Irons agrees. "There are echoes of concerned photojournalism," he says, "and then you immediately start thinking of human stories rather than of of the wall as a mere symbol."
Irons travelled to the West Bank at the suggestion of his friend Yousef Eldin, the half-Palestinian publisher of Mongrel, the Dublin-based monthly magazine. He didn't need a lot of persuasion; his mother, he says, has always been a "fervent supporter of the Palestinian cause".
Although the photographer grew up in England and is currently based in east London, staging his exhibition in Dublin is a sort of homecoming for Irons: as well as spending about a month a year at his parents' landmark pink castle near Ballydehob, in Co Cork, he spent his early 20s at university in Dublin, studying English at Trinity College - not entirely successfully.
"I was doing the wrong thing," he says. "I had a kind of a little, overly dramatic breakdown, because I just couldn't write essays any more and couldn't deal with critical theory any more. And, roughly at the same time, I had a eureka moment - pretty much out of nowhere." He suddenly realised, he says, that he was more interested in photography than he was in literature, so he moved to Brighton to study it.
It wasn't his first attempt at photography. When Irons was 18 he had a work placement with Mario Testino, the fashion photographer best known for his portraits of Princess Diana, and was subsequently offered a job. "It would have been a high-fashion, globe-trotting life, and I'm dead glad I turned it down," he says. "I think it would have sent me a bit mad. That kind of glossy fashion doesn't interest me. Nor does the world of fashion; it's either all sycophantic or really bitchy."
Instead, three years ago, after leaving Brighton, Irons teamed up with three like-minded photographers; as Etri, they collaborate on ideas and organise group shows for other emerging artists.
His parents have been very supportive. "I think they were relieved to have someone in the family who didn't want to go into acting," he says. He did try it out, starring, with his father and grandfather in Danny the Champion of the World in 1989. But it wasn't for him. "I'd had my taste. I was too young. I didn't seem to need it."
His brother, Max, on the other hand, is following the family line, taking a minor role in Being Julia in 2004 and currently training to be an actor. "Basically, I'm the black sheep of the family," says Sam. "I'd say about 90 per cent of them are either in acting or something to do with it."
Irons supplements his income by working as a location scout for films, which requires him to drive around England photographing suitable spots for scenes. The work gives him time to develop his own projects while neatly tapping into his professional interests.
"I've always been interested in landscape and spatial work, but with psychological, metaphorical overtones," he says of his photographs. "I like the idea of getting stuck, getting lost, losing context - a landscape being taken out of context."
That made the West Bank wall stand out for him, he says. "You whack a great big wall in the middle of something, and what was once two metres away, 100 metres away, two miles away disappears. The land behind it disappears; that part of your life disappears."
For his eight-day trip to the West Bank, Irons was accompanied by Yousef Eldin and Alice Quillet, a friend from his Trinity days who now writes for the International Herald Tribune in Paris. The pair acted as his assistants on the surprisingly trouble-free shoot. They simply followed the wall through the West Bank, photographing as they went. "It was a really good way of seeing a city," says Irons. "We just walked the wall. To have a line that you have to follow is a really democratic way - democratic is ironic in this context - to see the city."
Palestinians were pleased to see them and keen for people to hear about their plight, he says. Israeli soldiers were apathetic. "They would just watch us from the watchtowers, not caring at all," he says. "What that made us feel was that we could photograph the wall as much as we wanted, but it's not going anywhere."
They made their trip in April last year, at a relatively quiet time. Irons had been expecting a more perilous situation. "I spoke to journalists before I went out, and one said the most important thing you need is a bulletproof vest," he says. "Expressly for the trip I became a member of the National Union of Journalists, because I wanted a press card so I could get free passage." But they saw no danger, and the press card only invited problems. "I was bursting to bring it out should anyone question me. The only time I got questioned was in Tel Aviv airport, on the way out. They said: 'Are you a journalist?' And I said: 'Yes, yes, here's my card!' It prompted a three-hour search."
Wall: New Photographs from Israel and Palestine by Sam Irons is at Monster Truck, Dublin 8, May 25th-30th. See www.monstertruck.ie