'I feel for any man, woman or child that has had to live in a war and the nightmare stories I’ve heard from both sides are nothing short of shocking – shootings, torture, bombings, riots, prostitution, gun running and public rape. The majority of these horrors were hidden from newspapers…It was easy to forget that when the IRA fired back against the ‘occupying government’ they didn’t take sharp aim, but instead lashed out at any and all that weren’t from their neighbourhood or didn’t go to their church.' – Ed Kashi
About The Exhibition
Belfast Exposed is thrilled to be exhibiting No Surrender: The Protestants, a body of archival work by internationally renowned American photojournalist, Ed Kashi, presented here over thirty years after it was originally produced.
Created between 1988 and 1991, Kashi's work predates the 1993 Joint Declaration on Peace and the subsequent periods of ceasefires and Peace Process. It is an unsentimental view of working-class loyalist communities in both Belfast and further afield during that time, capturing the often surreal nature of daily life set in the backdrop of conflict.
In his own words, No Surrender represents Kashi's first ‘serious long-term project’. It provides an intimate look at Northern Ireland’s fractious Protestant neighbourhoods in an attempt to illustrate that loyalist communities were far from a universally privileged ruling upper class, and that, perhaps, what many fail to remember is that the real struggle for equality can only begin after peace – that consciously continuing a war can inadvertently make one’s own self the oppressor.
Many of the images that form part of this exhibition were first published in Kashi's 1991 book 'No Surrender: The Protestants' which is currently on sale in the Belfast Exposed Bookshop. The work is presented here in a new light, over three decades after it was first published and now in tandem with Mariusz Śmiejek's Not Surrendering - which provides a contemporary view of many of the issues and communities features in Kashi's earlier work.
No Surrender will be on display in our downstairs Archive Gallery from 5th - 28th October 2023.
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