In 1991, Krass Clement travelled through Ireland at the invitation of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, photographing Dublin, Belfast, and the small pub sequence later published as Drum. Belfast remained unpublished for more than thirty years. RRB Photobooks’ 2022 hardcover brings together 114 images made during Clement’s weeks in the northern city, where his customary manner—moving quietly through a place as a visitor and observer—encounters a landscape marked by its own historical pressure.
The city was still living with the effects of decades of conflict. The 1994 ceasefire had not yet arrived; the decline of shipbuilding and late twentieth-century economic policies had left large districts in need of regeneration. Clement photographs children on their way to school, shop fronts, domestic windows, open spaces between buildings, soldiers waiting in private front gardens, and children playing along streets that appear close to abandonment. He does not impose a journalistic thesis or assume the posture of a conflict photographer. The tension of the book arises from what the photographs find, not from an argument placed over them.
More than three decades later, Clement returned to the material and shaped the 114 previously unpublished photographs into a deliberate sequence. There are no captions or explanatory comments. Instead, the work develops through adjacency: a solitary figure, a shift in scale, a recurring architectural surface, or a pause between scenes. This restraint leaves the viewer room to read the city without reducing it to evidence or illustration.
For a serious collector, Belfast deserves attention as a substantial and long-delayed body of work within Clement’s Irish photography. Its importance lies especially in the edit, which preserves ambiguity while allowing the city’s political and social circumstances to remain present. Published by RRB Photobooks as a 2022 special edition, the book records not only Clement’s earlier encounter with Belfast but also the perspective made possible when an artist revisits photographs after time has altered their meaning.
