Street View: Chad Alexander

About The Exhibition

From December 2022, Belfast Exposed is proud to be sharing a range of work by Chad Alexander via our Street View installation.

Alexander, a Belfast-based artist and lecturer in photography, uses his work to examine themes of conflict, equity and urban environments. Much of his work is grounded in the built environment of Belfast and how it interacts with the various communities that live in the city. For Street View, he has provided a series of complimentary images from two of his photographic projects, Entires and Bonfire Portraits.

Entries (2016 - 19)

Entries is a series created between 2016 and 2019 in Belfast. Alexander photographed both people and places which underpin the artist’s relationships and experiences in Belfast, a city indelibly marked by decades of conflict. Many of the spaces were photographed at night, transformed by artificial street light and with a great sense of foreboding. Meanwhile, the portraits are created in intimate and domestic spaces; for example, living rooms and back gardens. They are sequenced alongside photographs of public spaces to highlight the conjunctions between public and private spaces, as well as the personal and political.

Bonfire Portraits (2016 - Present)

Bonfire Portraits is an ongoing series. It takes place during the annual celebration of The Battle of the Boyne - held around the 12th of July - that marks the victory of Protestant King William III over the Catholic King James II in 1690. It is a contentious event and time of the year in Northern Ireland. One that has often been a flash point for violence between small groups of nationalists and loyalists, especially at interface areas. For the series, Alexander purposefully avoided the sensational and dramatic aspects of the spectacle and instead turned his focus toward some of the young individuals who attended the celebration events, lit by the huge bonfires that characterise these celebrations, but which are always out of shot in Alexander's work.

By photographing the young people isolated from friends and family, Alexander shows their individuality within a collective identity. People in Northern Ireland are often categorised into two basic ideas of collective thinking and political views, which is an image that dominates media representation at the expense of a more nuanced view.