CIRCLE Volume 1 is a two-book set
containing “A Belfast Story” and “September ’89.”
Circle is a four-volume set of books by Martin Nangle in which he chronicles his journey as a photojournalist over the decades since 1973. In this first volume – A Belfast Story, he sets out his journey’s beginnings and how the city shaped his views on the world around him.
September ‘89 is the result of a ten day walk around parts of Boston while his first exhibition about Belfast was being displayed at the Centre for the Arts in Tremont Street.
“I was interested in the city’s Irishness and its strength as
the birthplace of the American Revolution.”
“During the 1980s I talked to German colleagues about Berlin, the Cold War and what might happen there.”
“I was being drawn towards producing a career defining documentary about “Divided Cities.” Belfast and Berlin shared similar characteristics; their segregation Walls representing the visible consequences of political and social policies.”
Circle volume 1 – A Belfast Story & September ’89
£240.00
During “The Troubles,” which the Irish, in their penchant for understatement called their seemingly interminable civil war, Martin Nangle’s camera was a weapon for understanding and tolerance. He chronicled both the suffering and the silence, the ordinary and the madness of everyday life in Belfast, the epicenter of The Troubles.
He humanized Northern Ireland’s people during a period when too many of them dehumanized each other.
His work captures in all their melancholic splendor the shuttered textile mills that a century before had made Belfast rich and famous; the old men and women who walked the Falls and Shankill roads, their lined faces telling jokes and stories, some sad, some life-affirming; the ghettoes - and that’s what they were - where the Protestant and Catholic working classes lived separately, without enough work, so they were in fact equal in their social deprivation, and in their share of suffering brought on by a centuries-old fight over history and power and religion and national allegiance.
Kevin Cullen, columnist, and former Ireland correspondent for The Boston Globe