Belfast is a divided city. I remember being there a couple of years ago in the daylight and feeling tense energies around the ‘peace lines’, walls meant to separate republicans and nationalist Catholics areas from loyalist and unionist Protestant areas. Even now, twenty-three years after Northern Ireland peace process and the Good Friday Agreement, these walls show no weaknesses and still impede cross-community trust at a local level. 

Irish photographer Enda Bowe’s series Love’s Fire Song depicts youth life on either side of the ‘peace lines’, taking as his starting point the symbolic bonfires of the 12th and 8th August, which mark the recurrence of King William of Orange’s victory in the 1690 Battle of the Boyne and the 1971 imprisonment of 342 nationalists. Yet, the bonfires’ warm light expands in the whole series, elevating Bowe’s documentary to a poetic and subtly symbolic level. Indeed, instead of merely picturing the tension and brutality of such places, Bowe’s images focus on the ordinary suspension lingering in the moments of intimacy and are capable of raising a quiet protest because of this destabilising intimacy, which is not represented but intrinsic to the images (Nancy 2005). Could this intimacy be seen as a key to an effective and ethical documentary practice? While violent and loud images seem to prevail in a contemporaneity studded by fast-selling images of suffering, whether caused by natural or socio-political disasters, photographs that give room for silence and human feelings have to be thought through. Indeed, they offer infinite possibilities of connections between the photographed people, the spectators, and the photographers themselves. Moreover, the effectiveness of Bowe’s series Love’s Fire Song, as in his previous project At Mirrored River, also lies in the absence of geographical and social context, opening up to universal interpretations of the vulnerability at stake. Far from causing that feeling that Mieke Bal addresses as ‘compassion’ (2007) while criticising and accusing “concerned photography of embracing the weakest possible idea of social engagement, namely compassion.” (Levi Strauss 2014, 131), Bowe’s images do aestheticise reality but for the sake of fostering human connection and the consequent understanding of the vulnerabilities of the others.