Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 25 May 2017

After The Off by Dermot Healy and photographs by Bruce Gilden

There’s always a risk in bringing two very different masters in their own form together to create something new. Sometimes it works spectacularly and sometimes it’s a bit of a car crash. Fortunately this collaboration is the former and, I have to say, something of an unexpected triumph – unexpected because Healy is an Irish poet and short story writer who celebrated the rural and bucolic while Gilden is an American street photographer famous for getting so close to his subjects that it’s almost uncomfortable.

Healy’s contribution is the text in the form of a short story of sorts. A small Irish town wakes up and begins to prepare for the day of the races and as the locals gather it is the pub that acts as the nodal point around which people come and go and life swirls. People jostle and strut, engage in running arguments and feuds and watch the strangers and visitors drift in and out..

The gypsies and travellers make their way to the town and tourists (Germans in this case) make an unexpected appearance, becoming the focus of attention, teasing and general ribaldry. And at the heart of all of this is betting – gambling as a sort of cultural capital.

The text with its unorthodox approach to dialogue creates a wordscape and backdrop to this almost timeless picture of the importance of the horse and horse racing events in Ireland. But it is Gilden’s photographs that arrest your attention. Bringing the techniques of street photography to what is essentially a photographic essay, even a piece of photographic journalism, is audacious. Gilden is famous for getting up close and personal with his subjects, working in black and white and making use of flash. This is a technique that gives the almost paradoxical effect of making the subject hyper-real and yet somehow exaggerated and caricatured. It’s an arresting technique that makes all its subjects look extraordinary.

Many of  the people depicted here are both timeless and almost impossible to age – they are made to look elemental, carved from bog-oak or pickled in brine. Bad teeth, sinews, big bellies and alarmingly made-up women thrust out of the page in a world where the horses make only fleeting, almost ghostly guest appearances; a leg here, a flank there, a tail over there.

It’s a wonderful large folio edition, beautifully printed with glowing black and white silver nitrate prints that the publishers Dewi Lewis Publishing has made a fine job of. Originally published in 1999 a good hardback copy can be found for around the £20 mark.

Terry Potter

May 2017