Rarity 16.8/100 · Collector 0/100 · Deal 6.03/100 · Listings: 2 · Avg price: $36.71 · Min price: $35.89

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Julie McCarthy’s *The Shankill: A Portrait of Pride and Resilience* focuses on the roughly mile-long Shankill Road in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and the working-class Protestant community for whom it is home. The title names the book’s central tension plainly: this is a place shaped by a complex and troubled history, but also by continuity, tradition and a durable sense of collective identity.

For three decades of sectarian violence, the Shankill was repeatedly represented through the immediate demands of conflict. After the 1998 Peace Agreement, much of the international press departed, even as the peace remained fragile and daily life continued. McCarthy’s project is positioned within that changed historical moment. Its subject is not the Shankill at the height of the Troubles, but the community in the present—proud of its traditions, conscious of its past and hoping to move beyond the terms by which it has so often been defined.

That emphasis gives the book its particular significance. Rather than approaching the district only as a symbol of Northern Ireland’s divisions, it directs attention toward the people who inhabit an area after it has ceased to command sustained journalistic attention. The subtitle’s pairing of pride and resilience avoids presenting survival as a simple resolution; it leaves room for the uneasy coexistence of inheritance, persistence and aspiration under a still-fragile peace.

Published by Daylight Books in 2025, the 96-page volume includes an introduction by Belfast writer Tony Macaulay alongside McCarthy’s photographs. For collectors concerned with socially engaged photography, contemporary Belfast or the visual record of post-agreement Northern Ireland, the book warrants attention as a deliberately present-tense portrait. Its value lies in the specificity of its place and moment: not a retrospective summary of conflict, but an account of a community continuing to negotiate how it is seen and how it understands itself.