• The Camera in wonderland

    Looking through the history of Cobh, one of the three large islands in Cork harbour, we are faced with a formidable image – the departure point from mass famine, huge emigration and the dark history of coffin and prisoner ships, bound for the southern hemisphere. All embarking from the beauty of this island shoreline. Add to this the fact that Cobh was the last port of call for the ill -fated Titanic and that the 700 or so survivors of the RMS Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat on 7 May 1915 near Kinsale, were brought back to land in Cobh, leaving 1,198 passengers dead in the sea, and we have in our minds a picture of a place of extraordinary pain and hardship.

    For 80 years or so, following the visit by Queen Victoria, Cobh was known as Queenstown. Immediately following the Great Famine of 1846-1848, her visit brought a sense of celebration to the town. In 1922, to mark the Anglo Irish Treaty, it was returned to its Irish original – Cobh, meaning ‘cove’ or ‘sheltered seaport’, reputed to be the second largest natural harbour in the world.

    For visitors today, Cobh is an exceptionally recreational location of some international profile, offering calm waters for sailing, angling and boat rental. Golf, tennis, riding and walks keep locals and not so locals occupied and the several festivals embrace music, the arts and the odd sea angling championship.

    The once magnificent Royal Cork Yacht Club is now the town’s dedicated arts venue – the Sirius Arts Centre – with its extraordinary views over the waters of the town and the history of the place embedded in its walls. A place where looking at art becomes almost a religious practice, bathed by the sublime light showering in through the arched windows, which still hold their grace.

    This history unravelled for the reader is not insignificant. Indeed, it is one which needs to be told if we are to behold in the photographs published in this book.

    Rather than a place for emigration fuelled by hardship and poverty, Sirius creates the opposite – opportunities for creatives from the world over, to reside in the artist’s studio underneath the arts complex, bringing their life and energy to the town. It was here that Evi Karagiannidi spent 29 days in 2008, each of them in the rain…

    So imagine. An artist is on an island. Great Island in fact. One full of pain and death. In the surrounding seas are the ghosts of many who have left the earth by tragedies of drowning, and the waters are becoming darker as the pollution created by the increasing sailing traffic affect their colour.

    Does she take us on a historical voyage through her images, to mirror the history of the place? Or does she turn instead to her own story – where the prisoners wait to go to a better place and she can see, like the narcissus, the reflection of her own face in the water?

    Indeed, Evi Karagiannidi proposes a different land to the one we see reflected in the ‘Queenstown Stories’ - a series of visitor attractions in Cobh, spinning out their history. Evi’s story, like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, shifts us from one reality to another through the eye of her camera. By a series of visual suggestions, Evi creates for us a guide, who could be Evi herself, led by her intuition through this foreign land, or could be each and every one of us, the viewers, as we embark on this journey of the imagination.

    Beginning as a figure in the gallery of Sirius Arts Centre, our guide then sheds her human form, leaving the dress in the window to watch over the sea - a signifier of times past. A reminder that people were here, but floated away. I see them, these ghostly forms, filling the harbour and flying like birds to secret graves, far out in the murky waters. But overridden by the beauty of the white dress, hung in the window for all to see - a flag, or beacon.

    Like some intrepid Victorian explorer she then takes us from the shoreline further inland, to almost secret sites of the most rich and lush texture, like delicacies laid out to sate our visual hunger. She provides us with a feast so exquisite that we forget about the death and the poverty and the tragedy. Instead, we are healed by the colours, vibrancy and calm of the still lives she creates for us. She feeds us the offerings from the earth, time after time, until we can look no more, as we are so overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of each morsel, that we feel we may die of joy or wonder. In short, we feel that like Alice - we have fallen down a rabbit hole and come out into a world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic* plants.

    It is no surprise then that the manner of Evi’s adventure were dictated by an extraordinary force of nature – continual rainfall on most days of the year preceding, which the locals told her was the reason for the wondrous nature of the plants. We can almost imagine having a conversation with the purple tipped bush surrounded by its ‘friends’. In fact, it takes on the human characteristic of someone infinitely energetic and engaging, curious to find out more about what we are doing there and the nature of our concerns.

    Had Evi chosen to write a story of her travels, rather than present them in a visual form, we would be in the realm of ‘literary nonsense’, the presentation of a world which is topsy-turvy, but not in the realm of fantasy. A literary genre which depends on a balance of sense and non-sense, on order and chaos. The effect of nonsense, according to Wim Tigges, author of The Anatomy of Literary Nonsense, is often caused by an excess of meaning, rather than the lack of it. Strictness balanced by semantic chaos. Nonsense can exist as a genre, in which many nonsense devices are used to create a careful balance - in short, the principle on which Lewis Carol wrote his Alice stories. Which Queen Victoria was one of the first to read, 16 years after her visit to Cobh….

    Like the author of any tale, Evi draws us in. Here is a wood (page 85) but just how far will we walk through it, before we are entwined by those trees which are bending towards us, seducing us to enter? And often, just before she arrives with her eye piece, it seems that someone has hurriedly put a bench there, inside a marble floored folly or dropped onto gravel in front of a yellow corrugated iron fence… an unlikely place to languish. Everywhere we are enticed to sit, stay or venture - and set out our picnic next to the umbrella on the lawn. And if we can’t walk, no problem, we even have an empty car which presents itself for our pleasure, framed before the luxuriously long hedge and deep blue sky.

    Rather than feeling we are being tricked and cajoled into acts of danger, I have instead the sense that this is all done for our pleasure. Evi, our guide, the invisible forces who create those sensual carpets of grass, or trees, or benches, are all there to tempt us away from the man-made representations of historical facts, just a stride away along the harbour, towards our own sense of discovery, and wonder about all things born of the earth. Essentially, we are encouraged to embrace a Taoist philosophy, a Chinese influence meaning literally ‘the way’, with a focus on nature, and the relationship between humanity and the cosmos.

    It would be wrong of me, as the author of this piece, to embark upon an interview with the photographer about her intentions for this series. A love of adventure and a deep sense of allowing herself to be guided by her intuition are indeed the intent by which we are led through this maze of storytelling, philosophical tradition and alchemy.

    In a world which is becoming increasingly besotted with economics, injustice and inhumanity, photography serves us well. It creates evidence to show what is wrong in the world, or to freeze moments which are iconically historical, so that those in future generations can share them and rejoice. See where they were and where they are now.

    As is the Taoist way, the human condition needs a balance to this harsh reality. And, lest we forget, photography is also capable of the most powerful story telling – a leap of faith from one universe to another.

    Evi’s story reminds us of this, a reminder of which I am grateful. Because though those documentary images I see in the newspapers speak to me of the human condition, sometimes I need to be shoved down a rabbit hole and encouraged to revel in the wonders of the natural world. A place where our spirit and intuition can be given free reign so that when we return via the rabbit hole, we do so rejuvenated and with lighter hearts, assisted to better deal with the harsh realities of the contemporary world.

    The white dress flutters over the sea…. The wicked Queen of Hearts is about to behead anyone who places the benches in the wrong folly, or sets down the umbrella too far to the left or right…. In the background, the Mad Hatter offers us tea, with cups and saucers balanced on the wide branches of the fir tree…. While the other Queen, Victoria, with her entourage, is about to play croquet on the flat and quiet lawn….

    Rhonda Wilson, 2010

    creative director of Rhubarb-Rhubarb-the UK's International Festival of the Image

      *Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts. Examples include animals and plants and forces of nature such as winds, rain or the sun depicted as creatures with human motivation able to reason and converse. The term derives from the combination of the Greek άνθρωπος (ánthrōpos), "human" and μορφή (morphē), "shape" or "form". It is strongly associated with art and storytelling where it has ancient roots.

    Rhonda Wilson is the Creative Director of Rhubarb-Rhubarb,
    the UK's International Festival of the Image.
    She is a Writer, Photographer, Curator and Reiki Master.