Text and photos via UPON PAPER
Good Rats, in the UPON PAPER space, is Niall O’Brien’s first solo-exhibition in Germany. The aesthetic of indifference in the Irish photographer’s images of young punks recalls street photography; however, the photos are not the product of a fleeting encounter, but of a direct and deliberate interaction with their protagonists. Thus, it is no coincidence that several of the photos were taken while the artist was shooting a film in 2007. “After the film I just felt compelled to keep photographing them,” says O’Brien. “They make a great picture and I think that was part of the reason why I originally pursued the project. But over time I came to realize that I’ve stumbled across something far more interesting than just energetic pictures.”
Working on Good Rats was not easy. Initially, the punks from southwest London’s Kingston Brew Crew did not accept the photographer. It took him two full years to gain the group’s trust. In the end, O’Brien spent a total of nearly five years with the teenagers — repeatedly joining them under bridges and in condemned buildings, watching them joking around, but also witnessing their violent outbursts and the dramas that occur when their carefree lifestyle occasionally mutates into despair. The apparent uniformity of the punks, their shared worldview and clothing, make it easy to oversee the fact that they possess very different personalities. These are young people still in the course of their—sometimes very rapid—development. Nonetheless, these 16-year-olds already bear within themselves the essence of that which will define them as adults. “After the film I just felt compelled
to keep photographing them”.
This genuine interest in his protagonists is related to the photographer’s own origins. Born in 1979 in Dublin, O’Brien began to photograph his friends in the nineties; like him, they were a part of the skater scene. After completing his studies at the Dun Laoghaire Institute, O’Brien moved to England, where he has since extensively exhibited his work. In 2010, he shot the summer campaign for Alexander McQueen’s label McQ, in the course of a road trip through the American West.
Many of the photos shown in the exhibition were taken in Berlin: O’Brien accompanied the KBC Punks during a trip to Germany one summer. Almost the instant the English punks arrived at Alexanderplatz, he says, they were taken in by local punks as though they were all members of a big family. The urban landscape of Berlin, with its open spaces, provides the setting for the photographs. With their poetic, expressive lighting and their sense of proximity and intimacy, they undermine viewers’ expectations—in a positive sense. The lightness of summer becomes palpable, and this can be particularly intensively experienced in an often somber city like Berlin. This is why O’Brien has always wanted to show this group of works there, in a city that—along with London, the birthplace of punk—has been unique in preserving this way of life in a vital form. “The boys loved it,” says O’Brien, if you ask them about their time there, “they would love to have stayed.”
Nonetheless, it must be pointed out that Good Rats is not an exploration of punk as a pop cultural phenomenon. Measured by the standards of pop culture, punk’s fashion codes are ancient—clothes from the past being worn by very young people. This has an interesting side effect: The eternal return of studs, leather, and Mohawk (a.k.a. Mohican) on the bodies of every new generation makes them seem all the more current. The prototypical leather jackets function like a filter that allows us to disregard local and chronological details. It is Berlin, but it could also be New York, London, or Beijing: Punk is international because youth is international. What makes O’Brien’s work so relevant is that the photographer is not interested in the current trends of youth culture, but in youth itself: an eternal phenomenon that, all around the world, always occurs as though for the first time.
TEXT Boris Pofalla, translation by Michael Wetzel.
Born in Dublin in 1979, Irish photographer and filmmaker O’Brien studied fine art photography at the renowned Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. He has exhibited widely in both Ireland and England and has many awards to his name, including the Irish Professional Photographer’s Association Rex Roberts Medal and the International Portfolio Review Bratislava “Top 20 Portfolios”. In October 2010 Niall was accepted as one of 49 artists to show in the Singapore International Photography Festival at the Lim Hak Tai Gallery, NAFA. His most recent film Anger was shown at Block T Gallery in Dublin as part of the 2011 Photo Ireland Festival. Nial O’Brien is represented by D + V Management, London.
ivan
June 14, 2012 at 9:49 am
lindas fotos!