In Plain Sight: An installation of photographs and survivors’ stories

Kim Haughton

Ordinary places. Crimes committed against children. Nobody saw anything.

In Plain Sight is a powerful and moving exhibition about the legacy of child abuse in Ireland. Made in collaboration with survivors, it is an important and timely challenge to the silence that still surrounds the issue.

Kim Haughton talks International Photojournalism: Out of the Darkroom with Ruth Medjber (watch the video here)

Kim Haughton talks International Photojournalism: Out of the Darkroom with Ruth Medjber (watch the video here)

The exhibition brings together landscape and portrait photography, family snapshots and audio recordings of survivors’ testimonies. Here, in their own words, survivors recount their stories of love, loss, injustice and forgiveness. Some survivors are photographed revisiting the locations where the abuse took place. These seemingly benign landscapes depict the mundane places of any Irish childhood. Now, however, irrevocably transformed into crime scenes and places of terror, they confront the viewer, raising uncomfortable questions of complicity and guilt and evoke powerful emotions of compassion, admiration, anger and outrage.

The exhibition also highlights the heroic efforts by one Garda detective to secure prosecutions against rapists. Despite his and other courageous individuals’ work, gross injustice remains. There has not been a single prosecution against those in overall authority whose actions - and inaction - shielded the rapists from justice. Moreover, the culture of secrecy and silence remains and looks set to continue into the future. This year, thousands of testimonies given by survivors to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, the Residential Institutions Review Committee and Redress Board will be locked away in a vault. They will be preserved but they will not be unearthed again for seventy-five years.

Kim Haughton is an award-winning photographer and lecturer now based in New York. Since starting her career at The Sunday Tribune, she has documented social and environmental issues throughout the world and has been commissioned by major international media including The Guardian, The Financial Times, Boston Globe, L’Express and Time. Her work with Irish NGO Concern was exhibited in the Gallery of Photography in 2010. She recently completed an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, exploring the relationship between art and documentary photography, and she has lectured widely on documentary practice. Her image of horses outside an abandoned house was chosen as one of eleven images to feature in the Guardian’s History of Europe in Pictures 1945-2011. She initiated the project ‘In Plain Sight’ in 2011. It received the inaugural Press Photographers’ Association Bursary, and a Project Award from the Arts Council. This is her first solo exhibition.

 

Exhibition dates

May 15th - 31st 2015


Gallery information

Opening hours

Open 6 days:

Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 5pm

Open Mondays by appointment for ongoing education, artists archiving and training.

Closed Sundays

Closed for bank holidays and public holidays


Admission is free 


Find us

Gallery of Photography Ireland

Meeting House Square,

Temple Bar,

Dublin D02 X406, Ireland