RETURN

3300
Nirvana Heire

Pariah Press, 2024
ISBN 978-1-9196296-4-3 Pb

This book presents a set of snapshots of damaged shop-fronts and other buildings around the Arndale Shopping Centre in central Manchester taken in the days following the 3,300lb IRA truck-bomb detonated there in June 1996. We see blown and cracked windows, glass and other debris strewn across pavements, staved-in shop grilles, safety barriers, police tape, glazing companies at work repairing the damage, local people inspecting the scene. The book's author, working as an electrician, discovered the 35mm Kodak machine prints in 2022 during renovation works to Manchester's former Debenham's department store, one of the buildings damaged by the bomb 26 years earlier. The prints were strewn across the carpet of what seems to have been a secure cash office.
            Nothing is known about who took the pictures or why, or why they were kept and then left behind when Debenham's closed in 2020. One image captures the reflection of the photographer in a window, a middle-aged man in shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow; but he has not yet been identified or come forward. Trying to make sense of the pictures, I imagine they were taken by a company employee to support an insurance claim, and remained in a filing cabinet for years – but it is little more than a guess.

            Like many snapshots, several of these have unintended formal and suggestive qualities, if you look at them with 'art goggles' on. An ice cream van ('Bens Ices, Best in Town') is commandeered as a road block; signs calling on shoppers to join the AA, the vehicle rescue service, are strewn with debris from an exploding lorry. All images from the past have a historical interest, and not only when the subject is a historic event. But most resonant here, for me, is the record of the consciousness of the photographer in a state of heightened attention. We seem to have a single roll of film (38 exposures), shot over a couple of days, and reproduced here in full, including all the retakes of scenes with minor variations. I sense the man pacing about, searching, noticing each instance of damage – look, there's one, and another, and then another.