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Obituary: Danny Burke
28 April, 2010
Nearly thirty years ago, in the period following the intense social and psychological trauma of the 1980-1981 Hunger Strikes, teacher, trade unionist and community activist Danny Burke brought together a small group of local photographers to initiate an exhibition of amateur photography reflecting the experience of Belfast from the inside. A call for work was made, with entry open to “any amateur photographer who wishes to explore any aspects of the city or its people”, photographs being preferred on the basis of content rather than artistic or technical merit.
The exhibition was called ‘Belfast Exposed’, and initially comprised over 200 photographs and slides, articulating the life of the city from predominately working class perspectives. Opening on 17 October 1983 at the People’s Theatre, Conway Mill, off the Falls Road, with Irish News photographer Hugh Russell officiating, the exhibition attracted visitors from all over the city, including Shankill and East Belfast. In fact the Shankill Bulletin gave the exhibition an excellent review, as did the Irish News and Belfast Telegraph. Attempting to forge solidarities across Belfast’s sectarian divide, Belfast Exposed, as the group itself came to be known, represented the work of photographers from a range of political backgrounds, while recruiting a ‘cross community’ steering committee and, where possible, bringing exhibitions to venues in neutral and in some cases to loyalist areas of the city. Opening the exhibition at the Bank of Ireland Gallery in Baggot Street, Dublin in 1984, Seamus Heaney remarked on the “powerful, democratic feel running through these photographs” which documented a common experience of unemployment, poor housing and economic deprivation, at once intensified by the effects of conflict and sectarian division and alleviated by the gritty humour of working class Belfast life.
Writing in 1993, many years after Belfast Exposed had first ‘stumbled into existence’, Danny Burke described its earliest beginning:
“The idea began to germinate with me after I received a letter from Davy, a 24 year old former student of mine who was serving a sentence in the republican section of the H-Blocks in Long Kesh. Davy, who had been in prison almost continuously since he was sixteen, wrote to me regularly and I visited him as often as possible. Knowing my interest in photography he suggested that I organise an exhibition of old photographs of the Lower Falls where he had grown up. His own street was being demolished and his family relocated. He felt such an exhibition would be of immense educational and historical interest locally”
Danny Burke sadly passed away on Friday 23 April 2010. He was a teacher, photographer, activist and director of the Safehouse gallery, a contemporary art space situated next door to Belfast Exposed gallery of photography on Donegall Street. While the organisation he helped found in 1983 subsequently moved in many different directions, Danny Burke’s founding principles continue to shape and profoundly influence the way this organisation seeks to relate and respond to Belfast and its people.