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Thirdspace in Willie Doherty’s Photo-Text Diptychs ofNorthern IrelandDerek GladwinPublished online: 23 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Derek Gladwin , Visual Culture in Britain (2014): Thirdspace in Willie Doherty’s Photo-Text Diptychs ofNorthern Ireland, Visual Culture in Britain, DOI: 10.1080/14714787.2014.870447

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Derek Gladwin

Thirdspace in Willie Doherty’s Photo-TextDiptychs of Northern Ireland

This article explores the visual artist Willie Doherty’s use of the photo-textdiptych in works produced in Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992. Anexamination of Doherty’s photo-text diptychs demonstrates what the postmoderngeographer Edward Soja has called ‘Thirdspace’ – a flexible way of thinkingabout fluctuating milieux of ideas, events, appearances and representations,and how these affect the ways geographical spaces change, both materially andin the way they are perceived. This article argues that through the photo-textdiptych Doherty invokes a Thirdspace, where representations of landscape,word, image and identity all converge spatially. This creates a borderland analo-gous to that separating Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic.

Keywords: Thirdspace, spatial, Willie Doherty, photo-text diptych, photography,Northern Ireland, visual culture

To what extent may a space be read or decoded?1

(Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space)

I

The diptych form, combining photography and writing, provides a par-ticular type of ‘visual vocabulary’, or language of visuality. WillieDoherty’s early photo-text diptychs address what the postmoderngeographer Edward Soja has called ‘Thirdspace’ – a flexible way ofthinking about fluctuating milieux of ideas, events, appearances andrepresentations, and how these affect the ways geographical spaceschange, both materially and in the way they are perceived.2 It is, how-ever, the juxtaposition of written word and image as a ‘photo-text’ thatcreates a narrative of place within Doherty’s use of Thirdspace. I arguethat examining the relationship between word and image in Doherty’sdiptychs articulates the political and social tensions within the sectarianconflict in Northern Ireland, but without falling into the reductive bin-aries of either/or partisanship that have encapsulated the conflict fordecades. This article considers how written word and image functiontogether as a photo-text and offers another way of viewing/readingDoherty’s diptychs as a spatial concern. Through the construction ofthe photo-text diptych Doherty invokes a Thirdspace, where representa-tions of landscape, word, image and identity all converge spatially. Bycombining some of the concerns of postmodern geography with text andimage studies, I offer an alternative way of viewing existing theoreticalapproaches to Doherty’s work.

Visual Culture in Britain, 2014http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2014.870447

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

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Doherty is a photographer and filmmaker who was born and still livesin Derry, Northern Ireland.3 During the last thirty years, his photographicand multimedia exhibitions have appeared internationally, and he hasbeen shortlisted for the Turner Prize twice, once in 1994 and again in2003. Doherty’s art has been compared to the work of Richard Long,Hamish Fulton, Chris Marker and Barbara Kruger for its ability to scrutin-ize the relationships between word and image, narrative and memory,aesthetics and politics, and concept and representation.4 According toDoherty himself, his art typically considers an ‘idea of exploring a specificlocation, or trying to locate a figure within a space or a landscape’.5 Withits site-specific methods of artistic production, particularly in the earlierphoto-text work, Doherty’s work centres on urban and rural locationswithin Co. Derry. In effect, the artist attempts to interrupt normativediscussions in Northern Ireland by presenting ambiguous narrativeswithin a conflict that has been historically demarcated between twoopposing sides: Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists. Doherty’spractice elucidates the politics of vision without attaching reductive bin-aries to representations of the Troubles. Although from a Protestant back-ground, and at the age of eleven in 1972 having witnessed the events ofBloody Sunday in Derry, his work interrogates the fissures within theconflict of Northern Ireland without taking a definitive position betweennationalist and unionist. In an interview with Fionna Barber, Dohertystated, ‘If anything my work is more about language and representationthan about an immediate response to anything’.6 In fact, by providingwhat he has referred to as an ‘unreliable image’ of a place or identity,Doherty allows a viewer to form his or her own response to seeing such aplace. It is my intention, then, to demonstrate that Doherty’s interest inlanguage, image, text, space and representation situates him as a uniquevisual artist within a severe ethno-religious divide in Northern Irelandthat has existed in various incarnations for decades.

Two primary arguments could be made about Doherty’s photo-textdiptychs. On the one hand, a structure of spatial opposites illustratedthrough the diptych form parallels the extreme partisan divide withinthe politics of Northern Ireland. Doherty’s diptychs present two opposingpanels that mirror the differing positions of Catholics and Protestants. Onthe other hand, the diptych demonstrates a non-partisan position, one thatDoherty publicly maintained, and shows both sides evenly representedwithin the space they both must share. It is impossible to avoid the subjectof Northern Ireland in Doherty’s earlier work, but it is possible to offeranother explanation of how Doherty has examined issues of place-basedpolitics and injustices through a visual culture that is not driven bypartisan ideology. With respect to the second argument, it is importantfirst to locate Doherty’s work within the tradition of Northern Irish visualculture, particularly the politics of space, before investigating how theconcept of Thirdspace can be applied to his photo-text diptychs.

There is no shortage of studies on the politics of space inNorthern Ireland.Although this focus tends to appear in the fields of geography and ethno-graphy, visual culture has also contributed here. Liam Kelly, for example,investigates the relationships among image, word and place in Doherty’s

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early photo-texts and contextualizes them within the greater Irish literarytradition.7 Fionna Barber’s introduction to her special Visual Culture inBritain issue on Northern Ireland argues that photography interrogateswhat has consistently been an issue for the politics of representation.Doherty is one of a few visual artists from Northern Ireland with an inter-national reputation, both connected to and distinct from his works relatingto the Troubles.8 Both Barber and Kelly underscore the issues surroundingthe politics of identity in relation to place, but focus less on spatial analysis.

With reference to Doherty, Jean Fisher maintains, ‘representation is amatter of positioning: the camera in relation to the object, the text inrelation to the image, the viewer in relation to the physicality of thephotographic installation’.9 Doherty’s use of the diptych on multiplescreens – a strategy he employs without the diptych in works such asthe mixed-media Re-run (2002) – attempts to position the viewer in thespace of the exhibit, not only looking at the space in the photograph. Thispositioning multiplies spatial possibilities. The viewer can look at thespace in the photograph or video screen and at the same time experiencethe space of the exhibition as he/she looks at the images. What Fisheroutlines here is essentially an argument about spatiality and how itunderpins not only modes within Doherty’s work, but also visual cultureas a whole. Fisher’s point also underscores the spatial relationshipswithin the implicit sectarian struggle depicted in the diptych, in thatthe positioning in relation to the city, images and language affects aviewer’s response. By citing Fisher, I want to briefly point out thatthere is an exhibition strategy at play here, one that I do not directlydiscuss in my argument but one that nevertheless illustrates the multi-plicity of Thirdspace in Doherty’s work. My argument is spatial to theextent that it looks at both the physical landscape in the photograph andthe structural space of the juxtaposed photo-text to think beyond thereductive binaries often attached to photography in Northern Ireland.

Justin Carville suggests that a ‘re-negotiation of the way space is repre-sented in the photographic image’ will begin to change the discussion ofvisual culture in Northern Ireland by opening it up to ‘multiple andcontesting narratives’.10 Similarly, the concept of Thirdspace opens upvarious narratives of spatial relationships in visual cultural studies, andcounters entrenched and opposing discourses of unionism and national-ism. The politics of landscape in Northern Ireland can be understoodmore clearly through transdisciplinary perspectives.11 We can, in fact,avoid reductive political binaries when re-imaging space in Doherty’sphoto-text diptychs through the multiplicities presented in both visualculture and critical or cultural geography. Through the notion ofThirdspace, we can view Doherty’s early work not so much in terms ofspeaking to political division, but as exploring shared spaces of possibility.

II

The spatial perspectives connected to the notion of Thirdspace are rootedin the ‘cultural turn’ that took place within the discipline of geography

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from the 1980s. They are broadly drawn from both British social geogra-phers interested in issues of space and power relations and Americangeographers concerned with symbolic productions of space.12 A primaryobjective of cultural geographers is to examine the relationships betweenhuman beings and environments, and the ways in which these speak todebates across various disciplinary boundaries.13 Geography, as thehuman geographer Derek Gregory points out, ‘is not confined to anyone discipline, or even to the specialised vocabularies of the academy; ittravels instead through social practices at large and is implicated inmyriad topographies of power and knowledge’.14 After all, the so-called‘spatial turn’ primarily resulted from cultural and human geography.Similarly to cultural studies in the humanities, cultural geography drewupon aspects of post-structuralism, feminism, postmodernism and post-colonial theory.15 Indeed, Soja pinpoints Michel Foucault as a figure whohas significantly contributed to spatial theory because he presentedanother way of critiquing issues of knowledge and power in cultureand society.16 By extension then, spatial approaches can be fruitfullyapplied when analysing space and place in Doherty’s own depictionsof knowledge and power in Northern Ireland. In short, both culturalgeography and visual culture are concerned with overlapping relation-ships of power, space, representation and identity, all of which Dohertyinterrogates in his own work.

For Soja’s Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places, urban spatial studies began with Henri Lefebvre’s origin-al assertion that space is socially produced. In his definitive 1974 studyThe Production of Space, Lefebvre outlines three approaches to spatialanalysis: spatial practice, representations of space and representationalspaces. Soja builds upon these in his own articulation of Thirdspace.Notions of spatial practice, or ‘perceived’ space, suggest ‘a society secretesthat society’s space; it propounds and presupposes it, in a dialecticalinteraction; it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropri-ates it’.17 It is a way of examining physical space, particularly intraditional geography where material spaces are perceived, approachedand analysed on a macro-level. Soja refers to Lefebvre’s idea of spatialpractice, also referred to as ‘real’ space, as ‘Firstspace’ because it ‘hasdominated the accumulation of spatial knowledge for centuries’.18 Onecontemporary example would be the spatial science of geographicalinformation systems (GIS) where satellite photography collects andorganizes data on the basis of empirical analysis.19

Lefebvre’s second approach, representations of space, builds upon theidea of spatial practice. Rather than viewing space as perceived or aswhat is one-dimensionally represented in spatial practice, he inverts it as‘conceived’ space, sometimes also referred to as ‘imagined’. For Lefebvre,representations of space are ‘conceptualized space, the space of scientists,planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers … allof whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what isconceived’.20 Whereas spatial practice focuses on the real (First) spaces,representations of space focus on the imagined (Second) spaces.According to Soja, Lefebvre’s concept of representations of space offers

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‘a storehouse of epistemological power’ where ‘language, discourse,texts, logos: the written and spoken word’ exclusively dominate.21 Infact, Soja’s concept of Secondspace emerges from Lefebvre’s notion ofrepresentations of space. Soja explains, ‘Secondspace is entirely idea-tional, made up of projections into the empirical world from conceivedor imagined geographies’.22 The sectarian rhetoric can be related to theconcepts of Firstspace (real)/Secondspace (imagined) because the subjectof the rhetoric fluctuates between arguments about physical territory andarguments based on what that territory represents, emotionally andhistorically. Therefore, the idea is that both the real and imagined spacesmust be protected or severed on the basis of the divided power inherentin geographical ownership.

The third and last illustration of Lefebvre’s triad of space, representa-tional space (or ‘lived’ space), is ‘directly lived through its associatedimages and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and“users”, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a fewwriters and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more thandescribe’.23 Lefebvre goes on to explain that representational spaces‘tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbolsand signs’.24 Soja hypothesizes that Lefebvre wrote The Production ofSpace with the primary ambition of explaining his idea of representa-tional space. Soja’s own geographical theory of Thirdspace was basedupon Lefebvre’s third spatial element, one that has been often over-looked by social and geographical theorists.25 Doherty’s use of photo-text diptychs might be viewed as aligned more with Soja’s Thirdspace,rather than First or Secondspace, because he uses ‘symbols and signs’ in‘lived’ spaces. However, real (First) and imagined (Second) spaces arepart of Thirdspace and these are equally present in the photo-textdiptychs.

While Lefebvre’s spatial theory focuses principally on socially con-structed space in the political economies of Marxism and capitalism, italso applies to other social spaces in which these issues are negotiated. Inthe context of Northern Ireland, for example, the issues related to socialspace include occupation, oppression, discrimination and sovereignty.Soja remarks that it is ‘political choice, the impetus of an explicit politicalproject, that gives special attention and particular contemporary rele-vance to spaces of representation, to lived space as a strategic locationfrom which to encompass, understand, and potentially transform allspaces simultaneously’.26 Thirdspace, as seen in Doherty’s photo-textdiptychs, represents ‘lived social space’ with ‘inclusive simultaneities,perils as well as possibilities’. It denotes, as Soja continues to argue, ‘thespace of social struggle’.27 Representation and identity function not onlyin Doherty’s work in visual culture, but also in previous post-colonialcritiques of the anti-colonial struggle in Northern Ireland. The theoreticalapparatus of post-colonial theory, however, has been thoroughly appliedto cultural production in Northern Ireland through historical and sociallenses, particularly in terms of visual surveillance and media. As a result,I want to investigate issues of visual representation from the perspectiveof spatial theory that also speaks to social struggle.

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Spatial analysis, both in form and function, encompasses the ‘whole’(i.e. culture, geography, politics, language, representation, etc.) withouteliminating individual parts within the whole. Thirdspace serves as away to expand upon previous ideas of spatial analysis by application to aphotograph as a both/and also logical way of evaluating space instead ofa singular or dualistic totalizing analysis. Soja’s notion of ‘both/and alsologic’ in Thirdspace offers an alternative way to view space beyond theclosed logic of either/or choice, and it does so without privileging oneover the other, with the ‘also’ reverberating back to disrupt the implicitclosure in two dimensional either/or logic.28 So, what I will be referringto in this article as ‘both/and also logic’ offers a critical exchange thatmoves beyond a limited one- or two-dimensionality and to a limitlessmultidimensionality.29 The concept of Thirdspace supports the simultan-eity of opposites and disjunctures as a means of understanding thespatial possibilities of the whole. Therefore, we can examine some ofthe contested spaces depicted in Doherty’s diptychs of Northern Irelandthrough a both/and also logic that does not follow the closed logic of aneither/or sectarian divide.

The perceived binary of the photo-text might suggest an inherentopposition to both. But this seemingly dualistic spatial arrangement isnot merely two-dimensional like Firstspace and Secondspace options.Rather than interpret the association between photo and text or betweennationalists and unionists as confrontational and oppositional, the photo-text diptych can be viewed as an attempt to examine constructed bound-aries of representation that exist owing to conflicting cultural and socialdistinctions. In other words, the diptych identifies these oppositions in itsinherent binary form, while it also challenges them because the layeredtext on the photograph performs another level of perceived opposition.These are, however, not boundaries as much as sites of interplay anddisjunction that join together and offer a multifaceted image. Thirdspace‘is disorderly, unruly, constantly evolving, unfixed, never presentable inpermanent constructions’.30 Words placed in the photograph functionmuch like the diptych form itself because they negotiate space and there-fore challenge preconceived meanings by referring to real and imaginedspaces. Words create linguistic dimensions that add to the political andspatial scope already inherent in the photograph.

III

One of Doherty’s earliest photo-text diptychs is titled Stone upon Stone(1986). On the left side, there is a photograph of a riverbank with text thatreads: ‘STONE UPON STONE/TIOCHAIDH AR LA/THE WEST BANKOF THE RIVER FOYLE’ (see Figure 1a). Tiochaidh ar la translates as ‘ourday will come’ and has been used as a nationalist slogan throughout thesectarian conflict. The accompanying text after the black title ‘STONEUPON STONE’ is in green, which is the nationalist colour derived fromthe Republic of Ireland flag. The west bank of the River Foyle in Derry isalso referred to as the ‘Bogside’, where the Catholic majority live.31

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On the right panel of the diptych, the same title ‘STONE UPON STONE’is similarly placed in the centre of the photograph but is in white notgreen (see Figure 1b). Below it are the words, ‘THIS WE WILLMAINTAIN/THE EAST BANK OF THE RIVER FOYLE’. The east bankof the River Foyle, in contrast to the Catholic west bank, consists of alargely Protestant section of Derry. The phrase ‘this we will maintain’ isin blue, which is a unionist colour derived from the Union Jack. Withoutthe written text, this diptych would probably be unintelligible to a

Figure 1a. Willie Doherty’sStone upon Stone (Diptych)‘West Bank’, 1986.

Figure 1b. Willie Doherty’sStone upon Stone (Diptych)‘East Bank’, 1986.

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viewer. Much like the diptych form itself, the two ideologies appear tocreate an inseparable divide: the river is an obvious spatial metaphor forsuch a partisan issue by emphasizing social as well as physical division.The written text, however, is what identifies a historical divide more thanthe photographs.

We might outline here some accounts of the use of image and word invisual culture. Peter Wagner describes the bi-medial space between textand image as an ‘iconotext’. This is where ‘the verbal and the visualsigns mingle to produce rhetoric that depends on the co-presence ofwords and images’.32 Like writer W.G. Sebald or photographer WillieDoherty – both of whom investigate the interplay between word andimage – Wagner wants to move ‘beyond the word-image opposition’,particularly initiated through art history and literature, but also throughother forms of visual rhetoric.33 In Picture Theory, W.J.T. Mitchelldescribes similar links among the terms ‘image/text’, ‘image-text’ and‘imagetext’. For Mitchell, the use of ‘image/text’ denotes a ‘gap,cleavage, or rupture in representation’. The term ‘imagetext’, on theother hand, ‘designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) thatcombine image and text’. Lastly, the hyphenated ‘image-text’ distin-guishes the relationship between the visual and verbal.34

Following some of these distinctions, I use the term ‘photo-text’ todescribe Doherty’s deployment of images and words. The photo-textdraws from Mitchell’s most apt example, the ‘image-text’, but at thesame time specifies the picture form as a photograph rather than othercategories of visual images. Text, in this case, specifically refers to writingas it mediates the space of the reader/viewer and the photograph.The term photo-text has also been drawn from other visual culturalcritics;35 it translates as space where ‘photography-writing’ proliferates,negotiates and interrogates meaning and representation for the reader/viewer. Doherty’s photo-text diptychs create a Thirdspace by usingboth/and also logic inclusive of the practice of photography/writing/representation, which together create a spatial affect beyond a binarylogic for the reader/viewer.

In Stone upon Stone, the use of text politicizes what appears to bemerely a shared geography of the river. This imagery highlights theissues at the heart of the Troubles – that is, the conflict, although seem-ingly about the legitimacy of geographical ‘real’ space (both rural andurban), exists in the words used as a form of representation and identity.Jean Fisher points out that ‘Doherty’s work asks, what forms of languageare capable of addressing and overcoming this social and politicalimpasse?’.36 By incorporating text (language) in the photographs,Doherty illustrates the ambiguous nature of written language withoutproper representation. Put another way, the words are signifiers of thesectarian conflict. Doherty even recycles omnipresent statements fromnationalist and unionist sloganeering to prove this point. This can beseen when he applies the ubiquitous phrases ‘our day will come’ or ‘thiswe will maintain’. The landscape does not contain the same type ofsignifier as the text placed over the photo. By using this style ofphoto-text, Doherty creates an overstated argument that negates itself

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as didactic. In other words, he satirizes the effusive rhetoric on both sidesof the conflict by superimposing controversial ideologies throughlanguage, with aims that are quite different, on a photograph of a rivershared by both Catholics and Protestants. Maeve Connolly has pointedout that ‘Doherty’s use of text is deliberately loaded and ambiguous’.37

The irony surrounding the photo-text is further on display owing to thejuxtaposition of the two frames in the structure of the diptych. Theapplication of Thirdspace here underscores a shared element of thediptych, which is the River Foyle that runs through and therefore osten-sibly divides Derry. The river, then, mediates the language by represent-ing a shared Thirdspace that unites everything in the diptych. This effectproduces the simultaneity of opposites as both/and also logic that con-tributes to understanding and promoting the possibilities of the wholerather than promoting division as in either/or logic.

One could also say, however, that satirizing the pervasive either/orbinary in sectarian rhetoric is limited at best. This opposition, even high-lighted by the structure of a diptych, oversimplifies the complexity of theissues that underpinned the Troubles in Northern Ireland during theperiod when these diptychs were created in the mid-1980s. Even if wedo not follow this debate all the way to its conclusion, it is important torecognize that Doherty places text in a photograph to lure the viewer intoa familiar (if not overused) frame of mind. This practice challenges thestereotypical binaries of either/or thinking that has continually emergedfrom the conflict. Indeed, such familiar oppositions have included:Protestant/Catholic, Londonderry/Derry, Unionist/Nationalist,Protecting/Invading, Loyalist/IRA, Blue/Green, Walls/Bogside andBritish State/Irish Republic. This list could equally be expanded, asseen in Doherty’s work, as the simultaneity of opposites found inThirdspace: Protestant/Catholic/Christian, Londonderry/Derry/City,Unionist/Nationalist/Citizen, Protecting/Invading/Sharing and soforth. To this end, the perceived opposites combine to make a wholerather than create separation.

One could also argue that Doherty’s early photo-text diptychs providean exaggerated critique of the Troubles, insofar as he could be perceivedas overstating obvious divisions. I would argue, however, and judgingby his subsequent work, that Doherty does not focus as much attentionon the historical politics; rather, he magnifies issues emerging from thespaces present in landscape, primarily through the ambiguity of thewritten text. The feminist and political filmmaker Pratibha Parmar hasargued, ‘The appropriation and use of space are political acts’.38

Doherty’s art similarly interrogates the appropriation and use of spaceas political acts. In doing so, he scrutinizes the perceived simplicity ofspace as an either/or binary and then offers a third way of viewing thespaces of conflict in his photo-text diptychs as both/and also logic,thereby disposing of the entrapment of extant modernist binaries thatcreate division and conflict. The point here is that Doherty’s photo-textdiptychs incorporate both the real and imagined spaces articulated byLefebvre and Soja as a multiplicity that creates a Thirdspace – or spaceswhere plurality instead of division emerges in the visual imagination.39

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For example, both the nationalist phrase ‘our day will come’ and theunionist slogan ‘this we will maintain’ placed in Stone upon Stone canexist concurrently rather than separately. After all, the two opposingbanks of the river are not exclusive of each other; rather, they are alsopart of the central feature of the River Foyle running through Derry.

In this sense, then, the river is part of the entire geography, notdistinctly divided and separate from it, and yet it also contains a per-ceived division as a ‘real’ space. We can see that the diptych denotes twosides of the river that exist simultaneously as Thirdspace. That is, we can‘perceive’ or ‘conceive’ of the river as separate, but the ‘lived’ space ofthe river is in fact part of the whole of Derry. This demonstrates thesimultaneity of the real and imagined spaces within Doherty’s photo-textdiptychs, while also preserving the individual frames on the left andright. The real and imagined space of the river in the photographindicates the plurality of Thirdspace. For example, the CraigavonBridge in Derry joins the two sides of the River Foyle that are respect-ively nationalist and unionist. Culture and history in Derry would notexist without the combination of both Catholic and Protestant popula-tions. The geographical divide of the river, much like the split in thediptych or in a borderland (a concept I will return to), obfuscates theshared Thirdspace that exists. By that I mean the real geography joinsboth banks of the river while the imagined space fuels the contestation ofthe conflict. Both real and imagined spaces occur instantaneously andcreate a both/and also logic that negates divisive opposition. The riverprovides a ‘space as directly lived, with all its intractability intact, a spacethat stretches across the images and symbols that accompany it, the spaceof “inhabitants” and “users”’.40 The River Foyle, for instance, cannotrealistically or even imaginatively be divided into two separate partsbecause it serves both populations in a similar capacity as a perceived(real) and conceived (imagined) space. The river can be viewed asThirdspace precisely because it is part of ‘simultaneously perceived,conceived, and lived worlds’.41 The River Foyle, then, concurrentlyrepresents both disunion and association in the Thirdspace of the livedworlds.

At the same time, the perceived geography and the conceived writtentext constitute the lived world represented by the diptych. Soja remarksthat Lefebvre takes care to notice that artists, writers, philosophers,ethnologists and psychoanalysts directly live in or inhabit a Thirdspace.These representative roles are also all participants of these livedThirdspaces, who aim to ‘describe rather than decipher and actively trans-form the worlds we live in’.42 Doherty stated in an interview: ‘Right fromthe very start my work has always been very much concerned with thebusiness of being in a place and living there all the time, not as avisitor.’43 There is a sense of a shared lived space in both the photographsand the real Derry in Doherty’s work. In this regard, Doherty is distin-guishing the idea of place as an aspect of the space in which he worksand lives. The human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues that space andplace are contingent upon modes of experience. Spaces are open andundefined while places contain personal meaning and emotional

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association. Tuan posits, ‘Place is security, space is freedom: we areattached to the one and long for the other’.44 Place is also a function ofspace, not its opposite or separate from it; they are not interchangeablebut dependent upon each other for meaning. Place, according to KentRyden, ‘is created when experience charges landscape with meaning’.45

Doherty and Soja, however, use the term space more often than place. AsTuan and Ryden describe, place functions more as an imaginative space.One of the reasons for using the term ‘space’ is that ‘place’, as an aspectof space, can be more susceptible to social construction, a pervasiveproblem in nationalist and unionist ideologies in Northern Ireland.46

Space, then, encompasses the idea of place but we can distance ourapproach to space from socially constructed ideas of place in a statethat is already fraught with entrenched notions of identity attached togeography. ‘Living in a space’, as Doherty suggests, indicates the con-nection to place; it also aligns with Lefebvre and Soja’s idea of ‘livedspace’ as part of Thirdspace.

In the diptych Protecting/Invading (1987), the left panel pictures a wind-ing road moving upward through a canopy of trees. The word‘PROTECTING’ is centred in the lower third of the frame (see Figure 2a).The right panel presents a high-angle bird’s eye view of a city in thedistance (presumably Derry), but the line of vision is somewhat disruptedby overgrown foliage (see Figure 2b). Centred in the lower third of theframe is the word ‘INVADING’. Again, as in the Stone upon Stone diptych,there initially appears to be a reductive either/or opposition between theunionist view of ‘protecting’ the space that is deemed lawfully theirs andthe nationalist position of ‘invading’ dispossessed space that is also con-sidered to be legitimately theirs. The positioning of these two conflictingideologies presents a way of spatially perceiving the multifaceted conflictin Derry.

The central idea in Protecting/Invading is that these two viewpoints areclearly shared by both sides of the conflict – that is, both unionists andnationalists invade as much as they protect, despite any denial to thecontrary. The verbs ‘invading’ and ‘protecting’, and the ways in whichthey relate to specific geographies for political representation, evoke aspatial as well as an historical and social analysis. The photographs of theaccompanying landscape, along with the superimposed written text,indicate that there is more to the legitimization of ownership than simplyprotecting and invading. These landscapes, unlike those in some ofDoherty’s other diptychs, are not urban zones. In fact, they are locatedon the peripheries of the city. The left panel, showing a winding roadthrough an overhang of trees, suggests an eventual but clear path to adestination. There is also a path to ‘protection’ since that is the accom-panying word on the diptych panel. Roads can be blocked, protecting apath to a destination or marking an invasion. If roads are blocked to acity, then the other method of access, which is represented in the rightpanel, is to approach the city by moving through the foliage of brush andtrees. These positions share the idea of Thirdspace as both distance andisolation. Protecting and invading are also terms highly dependent uponnegotiating space.

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By underlining the concept of both protecting and invading, there is ashared experience in Thirdspace, or what Lefebvre emphasized as livedexperience. The shared lived experience occurs in the landscape, whichcannot itself be demarcated into certain ideologies of representation – itcan only be done by an artist who chooses to highlight this experience forthe viewer, as Doherty does through the photo-text. Without the writtentext, this diptych would simply represent Firstspace or Secondspace as

Figure 2a. Willie Doherty’sProtecting/Invading (Diptych)‘Protecting’, 1987.

Figure 2b. Willie Doherty’sProtecting/Invading (Diptych)‘Invading’, 1987.

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real or imagined. The meaning, or interpretation for the viewer, becomesinfused in the image through the use of the photo-text, which therebygenerates the production of knowledge through its combination of writ-ten text and image. By incorporating written text and images as livedspaces, Thirdspace begins to emerge, creating the simultaneity ofopposites that constructs a whole and not division.

The idea of Thirdspace, as applied in Doherty’s work, could also beused to interrogate not only the text but also the spaces in which the textmay or may not be explicitly a presence. A narrative exists in a photo-graph regardless of any visible written text that may be present. PaulO’Brien, for example, has noticed this approach in Doherty’s work: ‘The(textless) images of burnt-out cars, blocked roads and the aftermath ofterrorist crime-scenes in Doherty’s photographs raise the question of howwe fill in meaning to images, in the context of the set of acceptedideological responses.’47 While the textless image undoubtedly containsa (silent) narrative, ‘the photographic image’, to draw from Barthes,represents ‘a message without a code’.48 Both the text and image ‘eachoccupy their own defined spaces’ that are also apart of one another.49

The larger task, however, is to emphasize the simultaneity of both thetext and the space as parts of Thirdspace, where Doherty’s photo-textdiptychs can be situated.

In the last photo-text diptych titled Strategy: Sever/Isolate (1989), Dohertymoves to the most urban of the landscapes discussed here. I want to endwith this diptych not because it chronologically follows the other two, butbecause it most clearly represents Doherty’s move toward creatingThirdspace in the photo-text form. He accomplishes this by juxtaposingtwo photo-texts that seem the least oppositional out of the three diptychsdiscussed in this article, insofar as they blur the partisan divide betweennationalist and unionist sympathies and create themost explicit depiction ofThirdspace in the urban geography. The left panel displays two two-laneroads mediated by a physical freeway divider. The word ‘SEVER’ is writtenin white letters and centred in the bottom third of the black and whitephotograph. The right panel of the diptych pictures a pedestrian walkwayover a roadway, presumably the two-lane roadway pictured in the leftpanel, with wire fencing surrounding the walkway. Much like the left-hand panel, the right uses the linear aspect of urban infrastructure, whichincludes distinct angles of buildings and roads. In white lettering the word‘ISOLATE’ is located in the centre of the right panel.

Like Protecting/Invading and Stone upon Stone, Strategy: Sever/Isolateunderscores the important relationship between text and space in theselandscape photographs. In Strategy: Sever/Isolate, however, the meaningof the words is less apparent. They obscure the recognizable oppositionalforces underpinning this representational space. Unlike the previous twodiptychs, Strategy: Sever/Isolate presents ambiguous meanings of the writ-ten word, in terms of their relationship with the juxtaposed image, andseems to suggest there are open and closed spaces. ‘Sever’ could relate tothe freedom of the open road as a way out of the divisive politicalquagmire, whereas ‘Isolate’ might suggest the fundamental reality ofconfined space in Derry. One photo is open, with the roadway extending

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both directions, and one is closed, with the wire fencing around apedestrian walkway. In connection to other diptychs, Strategy: Sever/Isolate indicates a crossing or connection between the previous opposi-tional spaces. Thirdspace is not only a site for struggle, but also a chosenspace for liberation and emancipation.50 Roads and walkways are spacesthat no one inhabits – people just pass through them – and yet they aretypes of bridge in the city that function as a shared lived space. That is tosay, material and conceptual bridges are open and closed spaces thatexist to open a broader space by connecting two distinct parts. The roadsand walkways that are connecting two points through one material objectcould offer some insight into the idea that verbs such as ‘severing’ and‘isolating’ express illusions within a spatial world. After all, built con-nectors, such as roads and bridges, exist despite contesting ideologiesamong the people who use them.

The material objects of the road and walkway exist as separate partsof the whole. The walkway, for example, extends over the road andtogether they are part of the infrastructure of this particular space thatis shared by all the people living in Derry as a whole. In Space and theIrish Cultural Imagination, Gerry Smyth argues that ‘[t]he bridge willalways be an ambivalent space, capable of reflecting unalienateddwelling while at the same time announcing the possibility of creatingdwelling ex nihilo’.51 The walkway in the ‘Isolate’ section of the diptychaccentuates the ambivalence of bridge space because it both dividesand unites those people living on either side.52 As a function of lan-guage, the word ‘bridge’ connects two meanings together in a sentenceor paragraph. Bridging meaning, or representation, is antithetical to thetwo terms listed in the diptychs. ‘Sever’ and ‘isolate’ are words thatevoke separation, not bridging. And yet, the bridge functions as areminder of how it joins together elements in opposition, whether itis the Craigavon Bridge over the River Foyle or this unnamed pedes-trian bridge. Smyth also contends that ‘the bridge is a necessary yetdangerous space, simultaneously holding together and keeping apartthe opposites on either side of the rift’.53 The idea of the limen (Latin forthreshold) is the root of liminality. It serves as another useful way ofthinking about the bridge as a spatial and linguistic term because itsuggests that the spaces located at the threshold of two opposingcategories cannot be one or the other. They exist simultaneously asboth separate and part of the whole. Such a threshold-creatingThirdspace bridges the ‘lived space’ at each side of it.

IV

Building upon the idea that rivers, roads and bridges are spaces thattraverse perceived and conceived boundaries, I want to conclude bybriefly discussing how Thirdspace, the photo-text and Doherty’s dip-tychs all come together at the thresholds of both real and imaginedborderlands that are lived spaces. The real borderlands of Derry relateto the imagined borderlands of the diptych form (with ambiguous text)

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and yet they are both lived spaces. The delineated space of Derry issituated on the border of Northern Ireland, part of the UnitedKingdom, and County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. Borderlandsare considered Thirdspace because they incorporate the geographies onboth sides of the border, as well as having an identity formed from thecombination of both places, thereby creating the concept of a border inthe first place. In a notable example, Gloria Anzaldua, while explainingthe United States and Mexico border, argues: ‘Borderlands are physicallypresent wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people ofdifferent races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middleand upper classes touch, where the space between two individualsshrinks with intimacy … It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, thisplace of contradictions.’54 Anzaldua’s description of a different borderprovides an apt comparison to the Thirdspace of the Republic andNorthern Ireland border. A border is a ‘place of contradictions’ whereseparating territorial lines are not only the real spaces of division, theyare also the imaginative spaces of overlapping differences, similaritiesand contradictions and can be explained through the both/and also logicof Thirdspace as the simultaneity of opposites and distinctions. Allborders share these characteristics and therefore share a similar universalrelationship to space.

Doherty deploys a similar approach in his photo-text diptychs, wherethe location of Derry is not clearly evident in the photograph for anoutsider. In their article ‘Border Crossings: New Approaches to theIrish Border’, Catherine Nash and Bryonie Reid point out that ‘[m]uchof the most creative and provocative work on borders … has come fromthose whose work itself challenges the borders between scholarship,autobiography and imaginative cultural forms, written, visual and per-formative’.55 It is, I want to suggest, the imaginative and autobiographi-cal work of visual artists such as Doherty that renegotiates the politics ofspace, through such examples as borders, as a way of introducing inno-vative models in visual culture. Doherty does this, in part, by employingthe photo-text diptych as a spatial form that expands beyond a tradi-tional dialectical Firstspace-Secondspace approach within the photo dip-tych or the overlying text.

The point here is that Doherty’s photo-text diptychs are representa-tions and critiques of the perceived Firstspace and conceivedSecondspace traditionally associated with borders. Borders have beenframed as reductive binaries owing to their dualistic construction.Northern Ireland – with all its urban interfaces dividing neighbour-hoods between Protestants and Catholics – functions almost exclu-sively as a bordered geography in terms of a ‘real’ or perceivedFirstspace. This, however, has been clearly stated by many criticsover the years. What I am suggesting is that Doherty uses the diptychto accentuate the bordered divides in Northern Ireland, and Derrymore specifically, by depicting two contrasting panels that also speakto a whole. This approach is an obvious artistic symbol of the greaterpolitical and spatial division in Northern Ireland. However, Doherty’sdiptych form, much like the existence of borderlands, functions

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instead as a Thirdspace and demonstrates the plurality of multifocalspaces within these seemingly restricted geographies. The Firstspaceshe depicts in the diptychs, such as roads, bridges, walkways andrivers, are clear markers of what seem like either/or binaries of divi-sion when in fact they contain the both/and also plurality ofThirdspace. In this respect, the photo-text diptych adds another layerupon an already richly textured spatial representation of the photo-graph because it contrasts and connects two words or phrases inrelation to the physical space in the photograph. The ambiguity ofthe words, referring back to Anzaldua, demonstrates the ‘place ofcontradictions’ in the actual landscape.

The complexity of Doherty’s photo-text diptychs is not based uponthe overt and, at times, sensationalized violence associated with visualdepictions of the Troubles. Instead, the photo-text diptych presents a setof symbols and words that seem to question or inquire about theambiguities and complexities of the contested space it magnifies.Doherty’s works offer a subversive critique not because they sensatio-nalize the Troubles; on the contrary, they highlight the spatial structureand content of the photograph that speak to pluralities instead of divi-sions. In doing so, they open up a way of reading the photo-text diptychas a Thirdspace that challenges the inherent power/knowledge dualityand adds the third element into the discussion of space/power/knowledge.56

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Willie Doherty for granting me permissions to reproducehis diptychs. I also want to thank Holly Slingsby, the gallery manager atMatt’s Gallery in London, for facilitating the transfer of the files and thecommunications between Doherty and myself. Lastly, I appreciate theincisive suggestions for revisions from the journal’s referees.

Notes

1 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 17 (emphasis in original).

2 Soja, Thirdspace, 2. Since Soja capitalizes many terms, such as Thirdspace, Secondspace, andHistoricality, I will keep this consistent in this article.

3 Despite the controversial place-name history between Londonderry or Derry, I will be referring tothis city as Derry, on the basis of Doherty’s own usage. In pre-Christian times Derry was known asDaire-Calgaich, or the ‘oak wood of Calgach’. During the reign of James I, particularly while under acharter granted to London companies in 1613, the name Derry was switched to Londonderry in orderto reflect British occupation. Because of this contested colonial history, the divide between usingLondonderry or Derry still exists. See Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 136–7.

4 O’Brien, ‘Willie Doherty’, 51.

5 Barber, ‘Ghost Stories’, 189.

6 Ibid., 193.

7 See chapter 1 in Kelly, Thinking Long.

8 Barber, ‘After the War’, 118.

9 Fisher, ‘Seeing beyond the Pale’, un-paginated (emphasis in original).

10 Carville, ‘Re-negotiated Territory’, 6.

11 Soja, Thirdspace, 3.

12 Scott, ‘Cultural Turns’, 24.

13 Duncan, Johnson and Schein, ‘Introduction’, 3.

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14 Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 11.

15 Scott, ‘Cultural Turns’, 24.

16 See Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 31.

17 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38.

18 Soja, Thirdspace, 74.

19 Ibid., 76.

20 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38.

21 Soja, Thirdspace, 67.

22 Ibid., 79.

23 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39 (emphasis added).

24 Ibid.

25 According to Soja, while the dialectic of Historicality-Sociality has received the bulk of criticalattention over the last couple centuries, Spatiality has largely existed on the peripheries. Thirdspace,78. One instance of this is when Michel Foucault famously stated to a group of architects in his 1967lecture ‘Of Other Spaces’ that if the obsession of the nineteenth century was time (Historicality), thenthe preoccupation of the twentieth century is with space (Spatiality). When Spatiality has beenaddressed in the past, this discussion often refers to the dualistic mode associated with Firstspace-Secondspace seen in Sociality and Historicality. Thirdspace, however, offers an expansive approachto Spatiality studies by addressing possibilities beyond only Historicality-Sociality. See Soja,Thirdspace, 70–82; Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 22–7.

26 Soja, Thirdspace, 68. It is important to note that ‘spaces of representation’ in Soja’s terminologyconstitutes the same as Lefebvre’s ‘representational spaces’.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., 7.

29 Ibid., 5.

30 Ibid., 70.

31 The place-name ‘Bogside’ typically connotes a pejorative association with the sinking, decomposingand stagnant mire of peat bog.

32 Wagner, ‘Introduction’, 16.

33 Ibid., 3–4.

34 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 89 n9.

35 The term ‘photo-textual’ has been used by Mac Giolla Leith and Lores to describe Doherty’s earlierdiptychs, but there has been little explanation as to how this idea functions within the image-textdiscussion of visual culture. See Mac Giolla Leith, ‘Troubled Memories’, 24; Lores, ‘The Streets WereDark’, 110.

36 Fisher, ‘Out of Position’, 39.

37 Connolly, ‘The Doubled Space’, 8 (emphasis in original).

38 Parmar, ‘Black Feminism’, 101.

39 Ibid., 11.

40 Ibid., 67.

41 Ibid., 86.

42 Ibid., 67 (emphasis in original).

43 Barber, ‘Ghost Stories’, 194.

44 Tuan, Space and Place, 3.

45 Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape, 221.

46 Graham, ‘Ireland and Irishness’, 3.

47 O’Brien, ‘Willie Doherty’, 53.

48 Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, 17.

49 Ibid., 16.

50 Soja, Thirdspace, 68.

51 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 149.

52 Ibid., 147–8.

53 Ibid., 149.

54 Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera, un-paginated preface.

55 Nash and Reid, ‘Border Crossings’, 268.

56 Soja, Thirdspace, 68.

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Derek Gladwin is a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar and PhD candidate inthe Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Hisresearch, through a combination of ecocritical, geographical and postcolonialapproaches, investigates twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature andvisual culture in the context of Ireland, the United Kingdom and the NorthAtlantic. His recent articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Irish StudiesReview, Photography and Culture, Gothic Studies and the CanadianJournal of Irish Studies, and he co-edited (with Robert Brazeau) the forth-coming anthology, Irish Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination ofJames Joyce (Cork University Press, 2014).

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