5 Frames of Ilford HP5 on the Streets of Belfast with a Minolta Maxxum 5

Belfast has been like a second home to me now for the better part of 20 years. I fell in love with the city and its people the first time I visited Belfast as an undergraduate in 2003 and have been back regularly for work and pleasure in the years since.

I decided to bring my plastic-fantastic Minolta Maxxum 5 along with me on my most recent visit in the summer of 2024, guided by nothing but a more general sense that I wanted to snap a few photos and have some fun while walking around the city.

I loaded up a roll of HP5 on my first ‘free day’ and started re-exploring the city I love so well. As I hiked the length and breadth of the city, I was flooded by the sense that Belfast itself is still a place of conflicting narratives and contradictions.

On the one hand, Belfast has become a more cosmopolitan city than it was even in the recent past. The city is a hotspot for ‘stag’ and ‘hen’ weekends. The Titanic Museum and filming locations for popular television programs like Game of Thrones have put Belfast on the map as a tourist destination for reasons wholly unrelated to the places troubled political past.

On the other, the legacy of 30-odd years of intense political violence has left its mark on the city, its geography, its people, and their way of being. Massive walls still separate Catholic neighborhoods and Protestant neighborhoods in West Belfast and elsewhere in the city. Memorials and memorial gardens to the victims (and the perpetrators) of political violence in the 20th century can cast a literal shadow over the streets. Paid tour guides, many of them former members of paramilitary organizations, can regularly be seen escorting tourists through the streets of working class neighborhoods in East and West Belfast discussing the Northern Ireland conflict and its representation in wall murals. The police are always deployed in pairs and, unlike elsewhere in the UK and unlike the Republic of Ireland, are always armed.

I set out to capture some of these narratives and contradictions with a filmstock that, much like Belfast, has always felt like a photographic ‘home’ to me. I learned how to shoot, develop, and make prints from film on HP5 when I was in high school. Shooting HP5 always feels ‘comfortable’ to me. It’s a film with great texture and grain structure, but also one whose exposure latitude I know well. That level of comfort allowed me to be more intentional and confident in composing these images.

Each of the five frames of HP5 shared here represents a piece of the story of Belfast as I perceived it during my most recent trip to the city.

First, at the top, the couple striding confidently down a city centre street, out to do some afternoon shopping, or pop into a café, at the top of the post.

Next, the picture of four revelers striding toward the city centre at the beginning of their hen night.

Then the police, who were a more visible presence in the city centre on this visit than in years past, on patrol, but on guard as well.

The outside looking-in view of the West Belfast memorial garden commemorating ‘D Company’ of the PIRA’s Belfast Brigade, with the memorial itself clouded by some light bokeh (highlighting my position as an outside observer who, as a outsider, can never fully understand the lives commemorated therein or their true meaning to the community).

Finally, the double exposure of a discarded hypodermic needle seen in waste ground near a police-installed sign warning the community about ‘anti-social behavior,’ showing how many working class communities in Belfast continue to struggle with social problems that the police and other state agencies have been unable or unwilling to address.

These five frames represent a double homecoming for me: I had given up my film photography habit after a brief flurry of shooting during lockdown. Shooting a familiar filmstock on a familiar camera gave me an opportunity to look at Belfast through new eyes and try to see the many overlapping stories of the place and its people through my lens.

I really enjoyed making these images! You can find more of my (occasional) film photography on Insta.

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