...................................

Name: Claire Dix

Lives in: Dublin

Occupation: TV director and stills photographer.
I've been working in television in Ireland and as a photographer for
about five years. To date small commissions and travel photography
have made up the bulk of my work and I've recently started to do
commercial shoots for album sleeves and fashion spreads.

Contact:

claire@clairedix.com

Website:

www.clairedix.com
...................................

INTERVIEW WITH CLAIRE DIX

“At the moment Dublin
is like a building site”

Ireland has now one of the most dynamic economies in Europe. And the important investments that it has received in recent years are transforming the capital city, Dublin, in a considerable way. Irish photographer Claire Dix gives here some clues to understanding a process that has many things in common with what’s taking place in other European cities.

Lucio Latorre
lucioteina@yahoo.es

The Republic of Ireland is one of the members of the European Union that has experienced more changes in the last decade. Is one of the states that knew best how to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the context of the UE.
Nowadays it has one of the most powerful and diversified economies. Hence, in the last years very important international enterprises and firms have landed in Irish territories, which means that huge flows of investment have been channelled into the country. Investments generate changes and transformations not exclusively in the areas that they are meant for. They go further and also stimulate many others areas of the economy.
And when an economy starts to go well, it is the housing sector one of the first to notice its benefits. In fact, the state of that sector is one of the main parameters to assess the economical situation of a country. If the sector is fine, the country’s too. If is not, the same goes for the country. More or less, that’s the general logic. It is at this moment when the bubbles appear, grow and then explode, which says that the situation was not as good as it seemed to be; it’s there when topics about land speculation and such come up…(for more details about this, see “The brick and the globe: architecture, idealism and land speculation”, by Fredric Jameson).

Dublin, the capital of Ireland, is not the exception. At least not with regard to the building and transforming process of the city. Dublin is going through a permanent change process. A proof of this are the enormous cranes that appear all over the urban area, and have already become part of the skyline.
That kind of process generally has positive sides and also negative. Requested by teína, Irish graphic artist Claire Dix took some photos where some of the most characteristic lineaments of today’s Dublin can be appreciated.
Below, the conversation that she had with this magazine:

In the pics we can clearly appreciate some elements that show a traditional side of the city, like horses, towers and the front of old buildings, at the same time that we see cranes coming up everywhere, which is actually changing Dublin’s look. What do these contrasts suggest to you?

The picture you’re talking about was taken in Smithfield, which is a relatively new development in the city centre of Dublin. It’s mainly residential but there’s a big open public space there aswell where a couple of concerts have been held and a horse fair goes on there once a month. When I set out to take these pictures I was just strolling around looking for cranes and I forgot that the horse fair was going on. I wasn’t intentionally looking for a shot that would comment on the old and new city together or anything like that, it was just an accident really.

Except in a few of them, most of the cities that have gone through a similar growing and transforming process as Dublin is going through now, have been more interested in things like stimulating traffic and the use of cars (by increasing the size of avenues, or turning walking spaces into traffic areas, …) than in keeping and creating new public places where people can meet and interact. In your pictures you mixed some traffic lights that become important into the whole photo composition. Is that linked with this idea or it is just an esthetic thing?

That was the point of the pictures: to superimpose streaky night traffic lights with shots of cranes. When I was asked to contribute to TEINA as a photographer living in Dublin and to comment on what that meant, cranes and cars were the first images that came to mind. At the moment Dublin is like a building site. There’s a new public transport system being installed and loads of other projects going on at the same time and I think most people in Dublin have resigned themselves to another few years of picking their way through building sites to get to work.

They’re trying to do the opposite of stimulating traffic here; bus lanes have been increased and this new public transport system are all aimed at trying to get people to stop bringing their cars into the city. I don’t know how successful they’re going to be, people here like their cars a bit too much. Trying to get across the city during rush hour is not advisable. For the size of the city it takes a ridiculously long time to get from one end of it to the other. House prices are just as ridiculous. People are commuting to Dublin from towns about 20 miles or more outside Dublin, and at rush hour it’ll take them about 2 hours to cover that distance.

Can those photos be also interpreted as a reference to this high speed style of living that seems to deal only with daily vertigo, and that in big cities it has actually became a way of life?

I suppose so but I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Maybe not the daily vertigo idea that doesn’t sound too pleasant.

Do you think that Dublin, as a consequence of all those changes, is losing some urban quality? Or some of its main characteristics?

I think on the most part the development of the city centre is a good thing. Smithfield is a really nice area now and before Temple Bar was developed I think it was pretty much a waste-ground so it’s good to see new areas of the city being rejuvenated and to see more people being encouraged to live in the city centre and everything but there’s also a lot of building that’s being thrown up, especially apartment blocks. They’re built really quickly, and it seems when you’re in them really cheaply, walls like paper that sort of thing, and they’re like clones of all the other blocks that have gone up in the city in recent years.

It’s a controversial issue here at the moment – the corruption involved in the re-zoning of land around the city. I won’t go into it cause I don’t have all the facts and figures – but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reverence for some of the historical buildings and sites that are in the city. It boils down to money in the end but for example there’s an historically significant building around the corner from the General Post Office in O’ Connell street that is in danger of being demolished to let some commercial building go up. So in that sense it’s losing a lot so that business can prosper sort of at all costs.

You are also preparing a project about living in Dublin. Can you tell something about the main lines that you’ll be working in?

It’s a series of portraits of people in their homes. Like I was saying before renting and buying property in Dublin is really expensive. I think it’s the most expensive euro city to live in actually, or one of the top three anyway. There’s a big social housing problem here because of it and the rate of homelessness is growing. The pictures will be of lots of different people in different situations and in various financial situations, like students, immigrants, lots of families, some friends, in their homes. Hopefully it will give an idea to whoever sees them of the standard of living here at the moment and how little you can get in Dublin for the huge sums of money you have to fork out.