I began photographing the graffiti and murals of Northern Ireland in 1979, which meant that at least while the war was continuing (for the next nineteen years or so), I spent a good amount of time wandering around conflict zones with a camera and little or no justification other than a desire to record what I took to be important historical and cultural materials. As might be imagined, this was often a complicated—not to say on occasion dangerous—undertaking, although the perils varied. One constant was the hostility of British soldiers and Royal Ulster Constabulary police officers, which meant that the same scenario was played out repeatedly (at least in republican areas). They would stop me, ask me where I had been and what was I doing (questions I was obliged to answer under the law), and then proceed to give me a better account of my day’s activities than I could have rendered myself. Then followed the “P” check—in which my identity and records were verified—then the four-hour detention, which was the maximum they could hold you without formally arresting you, and then finally the eventual return of my camera with the film removed or destroyed by exposure (these were the days before digital technology). And yet despite the number of times that I was stopped by State forces, I was never once informed why they wanted to stop me from taking photographs. It may simply be that their actions amounted to a recognition of, and resentment towards, the cultural and political impact of the republican murals. This would certainly explain both the soldiers’ attempts to destroy these works by paint-bombing, which entailed throwing balloons full of paint (often during the dawn patrols) [image 44], and the fact that soldiers and cops would simply ignore me when I was taking pictures of loyalist murals. But in spite of complaining to squaddies on the street, intelligence officers in barracks, the R.U.C., British Army HQ Northern Ireland, and my Member of Parliament, nobody ever quite explained to me why it was forbidden to take photographs of paintings on walls in areas that were, according to Margaret Thatcher, “as British as Finchley.” [9] 

Encounters with State forces could be pretty hostile and sometimes physically abusive, but I never quite felt that I was in any real danger. And much the same was true of my experience in republican areas. People were, of course, pretty wary of someone wandering around with a camera—understandably so given the level of overt and covert surveillance to which they were subject—but more often than not, once I had explained what I was doing, the local response was friendly, generous, and helpful. In addition, I walked or used public transport almost exclusively, which made my presence less suspicious since at that time, only a very foolish (or very well backed-up) undercover operative would stroll around republican West Belfast every day for considerable periods of time. This did not, however, prevent my 

“arrest” on a number of occasions by a variety of republican organizations, predominantly the IRA. Such encounters were usually relatively polite and predictable: someone would casually approach, ask me what I was doing, chat for a little while, and then a few minutes later a car would pull up with an invitation to get in, I would be delivered to a house or office nearby, I’d answer some questions, they would fill me in on the republican view of the world, and then send me on my way (often with tips for finding new murals). On very rare occasions I would lose a roll of film in such meetings, and my assumption was that this was because active service IRA personnel had been in the neighborhood where I had been taking pictures. Confiscations were highly unusual, however, since republicans were keen to foster publicity and were normally more than happy to facilitate coverage of the murals. There were moments of tension, though, not least when I pointed out a spelling mistake in a large piece of graffiti painted on a wall just over from the Sinn Féin offices during the 1981 Hunger Strike [images 45, 46]. My orthographical observation was not particularly well received.

In fact, one of the “reassuring”—an odd word in the circumstances perhaps, but true nonetheless—aspects of walking and photographing in republican areas was the knowledge that if I was “arrested,” the various organizations likely to be involved had both a political and military command structure. That meant that even if people lower down the line were hostile, by the time I was dealing with anyone of seniority, things would be resolved pretty quickly for the reasons outlined above. Unfortunately, this was not always the case in loyalist areas, for the simple structural reason that there the paramilitary organizations did not necessarily have politically associated groups (and certainly none that saw the murals as an important element of a political strategy). That made being “arrested” in loyalist areas much more problematic, since it would often be unclear which organization was involved, who I was dealing with, and who they might refer to in order to resolve the situation. That is not to say that such occasions were always difficult. Like their opposite numbers in republican organizations, loyalist paramilitaries were often amused—not to say bemused—by the idea of someone wandering around the estates taking pictures of the murals, and they were genuinely interested in my explanation of wanting to record them as historical documents. Sometimes, however, such encounters were unpleasant and threatening—particularly when attention was drawn to my “Catholic” surname—and they could often last the best part of a day, with me sitting in the corner of a loyalist drinking club, being passed on from person to person, none of whom seemed to have much idea what to do next. Yet even that level of intimidation was limited in comparison to the very infrequent nastiness of meetings with locals in areas—republican and loyalist—who were antagonistic or violent towards me simply because I was a stranger with a camera. Usually this involved groups of young men, often drunk, who took it upon themselves to act as “defenders” of their locality. This was a different sort of difficulty altogether, since they were not allied to any paramilitary or political organization and were all the more dangerous for it. Indeed, on more than one occasion, I defended myself with the claim that my work photographing the murals had been sanctioned by the IRA/INLA/UDA/UVF, and that if there was a problem they needed to contact them to sort it out. It usually worked; if it didn’t, I tried the well-established journalistic technique of bribery—offering to buy them a drink. And if that didn’t work, I did the sensible thing and ran.

These, then, were one set of practical obstacles that I had in taking the photos and getting them out. But once I had the images, the question was what to do with them once they were printed, up courtesy of Oxford Photographer’s Workshop. My first idea was to incorporate the photographs in a course on Contemporary Irish Culture that I began teaching in my first post at the University of Southampton in 1984. There were problems with this early attempt at disseminating the material, however, not least in the awkwardness of using photos in the classroom. (I switched to the use of slide film in the mid-1980s.) More importantly, however, although the field of Irish Studies later became extremely popular—not to say trendy—the prospects for such courses in the early 1980s in Britain were pretty poor. In my own case, this was hardly helped by the fact that a few days before the course began, on October 12, 1984, the IRA bombed the Conservative Party Conference and came within a whisker of killing then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. It was “not an opportune moment,” as my Head of Department put it at the time, but that was hardly of my making. In any case, the images of the murals themselves were always popular in class, and they were exhibited at a few small galleries. But despite updating the collection on a regular basis, the problem of giving access to the materials remained. Slides helped, of course, and made the use of the images in class much easier, yet the limitations were clear.

And then came the digital revolution… I moved to a Chair in the English Department at the University of Manchester in 1994 and spent a number of years teaching a version of my Contemporary Irish Culture course, continuing to use slides, and trying unsuccessfully to persuade both the university and funding bodies to invest in the creation of some sort of archival resource.[10]  By that point, of course, Irish Studies had become reasonably well-established in British universities, and even traditionalist opponents seemed to recognize the importance of studying the conflict in Northern Ireland. Even so, it remained difficult to attract support for work on the murals; between 1984 and 2005, despite a number of applications to the main agencies, I received no funding for mural-related research in the North. The reasons for this reluctance to acknowledge the significance of the murals as cultural and political phenomena are unclear. In any case, the resistance was real enough and it persists despite the emergence of a number of collections that document aspects of the history of the murals. [11]

With regard to digitizing the collection, the first break came while I was at the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2004-2005. Preparing for a talk on the murals, I encountered a technician who explained the possibilities of digital reproduction. While eye-opening and exciting, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to explore the opportunities that digitization offered; but things changed completely in 2005 when I was offered the Chair of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Scripps College, one of the colleges of the Claremont University Consortium in Southern California. Again, the initial contact was unplanned, no more than a chance discussion with Pat Vince, at the time heading up the newly-conceived Claremont Colleges Digital Library (CCDL), and her assistant Allegra Gonzalez. We talked over the possibilities, they reviewed the materials, and we agreed to create the Murals of Northern Ireland archive as part of the CCDL. Needless to say, there was a great deal of preliminary work, none of which would have been possible without the financial support of Scripps College and the patience, generosity, and technical savvy of the above-mentioned Allegra Gonzalez, the Digital Initiatives Librarian, and, latterly, Chris Jones, the Digital Production Librarian, at CCDL. 

The work fell into several parts. First the digitization of the materials: the thousands of negatives, photographs, and slides stretching back some twenty-five years or so had to be turned into digital images of the right size and format. Second, I had to master the intricacies of the software—CONTENTdm Acquisition Station—in order to upload the images. And third, and most important, I had to understand and work with the standard international referencing program for digital archives, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set system. This final aspect was the most tricky and time-consuming since the purpose of the metadata is to facilitate “the discovery, use, management, and preservation of the digital resource,” and thus it is separated into three commonly accepted types (with some overlap between them): “discovery/descriptive metadata”; “structural metadata”; and “administrative metadata.”[12]  My role was, and is, to supply the discovery/descriptive material, which is essentially the information displayed online to users of the archive.[13]  This requires, for each image in the archive, the inputting of information categorized under fifteen “elements”: Title, Creator, Contributor, Subject, Coverage, Description, Publisher, Date, Language, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Relation, and Rights. In fact, during the compilation of the collection, it became necessary to adapt the categories slightly, but the basic structure has remained the same. Of course some elements were simply standard and repeatable—the photographer, the publisher, and so on—while others were highly complex and difficult. Some Descriptions—in the case of an intricate mural for example—could take as long as a day to complete [image 47].