In May 1999, the Northern Ireland (Location of Victims’ Remains) Bill was passed in the House of Commons. It provided an amnesty to help identify and locate people who had disappeared during the ‘Troubles’. Six locations were identified and became known as the ‘Sites of The Disappeared’: the burial places of eight people murdered by the IRA in the 1970s and early 1980s. In thirty years of conflict and atrocities, this small group stood apart. They were all Catholic and, as it turned out, had not only been taken from their families but also from their homeland to be buried in the South. In June 2000 the search was finally suspended. Three remains had been located, three closures permitted; for the remaining five families there was a site rather than a spot, a closing rather than a closure.

David Farrell was born in Dublin in 1961 and has worked as a freelance photographer since 1990, contributing to The Sunday Business Post, The Observer magazine and The Telegraph magazine, among others. He also teaches photography part-time. He photographed the six sites for this book.

Innocent Landscapes was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2001 as a hardback of 136 pages, with 65 colour photographs, measuring 300 by 200 millimetres. It won the 2001 European Publishers Award for Photography.

The book holds to terrain that stayed ordinary under the weight of what happened there. Its structure asks whether a place can be a grave when no body has been found, and its even attention becomes a record of an unresolved search. For a collector, this is a complete, single-author sequence made while the story was still open, a restrained response to a period of Irish and British history that is still being written.