Glass bottles of milk waiting calmly lined up on a doorstep, laughing children making a straw doll before a parade, an abandoned sofa in the middle of a street with blackened facades: these are not the kind of images we have in mind when we talk about the conflict in Northern Ireland, which left more than three thousand five hundred dead between the end of the 1960s and the peace agreements of 1998.
What remains etched in memory are the violent confrontations immortalized in black and white by famous photojournalists such as Don McCullin or Gilles Peress, in the early 1970s. The contemplative Kodachrome by Akihiko Okamura (1929-1985), bathed in melancholic color, offers. an unconventional look at the “problems” faced by loyalists (Protestants) faithful to Great Britain and nationalists (Catholics) opposed to the British presence and in favor of the reunification of the island. A strange mystery floats over these images, just like the one that surrounds their author.
The only Japanese who covered these bloody events, this photographer in love with Ireland, with his heart anchored to the left and sensitive to the anti-colonial demands of the Catholic republicans, had even decided to live there. Settling with his family south of Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, in 1969, he remained there for more than fifteen years, touring both the independent south of the island and the British north, with its Catholics and Protestants in Derry and Belfast, photographing political leaders of each side. But no one there seems to have retained any memory of his activity, as if Okamura had passed through the events like an invisible man.
Little-known clichés
His reports on the heart of the Vietnam War, published in the magazine life in 1964 and 1965, had previously given him great notoriety. His photographs taken in Ireland remain little known and, for the most part, unpublished. For this original and sensitive perspective to be recognized, it was necessary to have an exhibition at the Photo Museum Ireland, in Dublin, this summer, and a book, Memories of others (EXB Workshop, 160 pages), led by Pauline Vermare, a photography historian, who dedicated her thesis to photographic representations of Northern Ireland.
While Akihiko Okamura followed the riots in the Bogside district of Derry in 1969, he never photographed the violence directly. He alludes to it with small touches, with poetic compositions, with calculated ambivalence. Thus these innocently white milk bottles, which become weapons when transformed into Molotov cocktails.
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