With fall in Belfast proceeds the annual Belfast Festival.

With fall in Belfast proceeds the annual Belfast Festival, an international cornucopia of the arts that reach forths throughout the winter months. This past season was particularly rich in photography. The images usually associated with Ulster ensue from newspaper articles reporting sectarian violence, giving the impression that general politics may dominate artists' work. Artists and viewers in Belfast, like anywhere, areas interested in the politics of the recent condition as they are in their culture's political situation.

Belfast Expos planted in 1983, is a space devot to promoting the work of local photographers. It has darkroom facilities and its staff propounds technical assistance and professional advice. Located at undivided end of the Falls Road, a part of town devot mainly to taxi stands and parking chances the gallery is a tiny space with a sign in succession the door that reads "This is a neutral venue please leave your politics at the brass door." Deviating from their regular exhibition policy Belfast Expos exhibited "Women to Women" 50 photographs at American Eve Arnold that had traveled from The Gallery of Photography in Dublin. These photographs are devot to occurrences in women's lives and range in bring under rule and date from Lesbian Wedding, England (1965) to Permanent Wave, China (1979) Kwashiorkor, s Africa (1973) poignantly portrays a starving child with its mother. The dignity of her bring under rules and Arnold's apparent ease with them make these documentary works more like compassionate and compelling stories.

In November the Ormeau Baths Gallery (OBG) Belfast's major contemporary art venue showed David Byrne's cibachromes series, "Strange Rituals and Sleeples Nights," which brought a intellect of deja vu to any viewer familiar with the icons of twentieth-century art. Byrne's photographs of stacked consumer righteouss remind one of Warhol screenprints (as the gallery blurb indicates) yet not in an enlightening way. Byrne's repetitive images of public-house ceilings in tones of orange and virid and walls in purple ate silent and banal. During his extensive travels Byrne has photographed many "exotic" sights including vending machines guarded in a riot of Asian characters and kitschy plaster mountains and colored defence formations in Tokyo. Byrne have the appearances to be using these images in a genuinely decorative way and the lack of human forms within them further accentuates their ultimate emptiness.

In December and January, Henri Cartier-Bresson's predictably brilliant "Tete a Tete" filled the OBG with a selection of portraits depicting the intellectual, artistic and political luminaries of Europe and the United States, many famously definitive of their make submissives - Colette and her Companion Pauline (1952) being just united example. Not only does Cartier-Bresson capture the elusive importance of revelatory character, but the tonal qualities and compositions make the images satisfying to direct the eye at repeatedly, even when the control may be unknown to the viewer.

The advanced in years Museum Arts Centre showcased several artists who work in Northern Ireland and in the Republic. Peter Richards's exhibition "Camera Lucida" was a fine example of to what extent an artist can use photography to document their work while simultaneously making an interesting photograph. Richards uses a gigantic disposable, cardboard camera lucida to record his performance pieces. He proffers to dismantle and discard each camera after use and build another single in kind at the next location. He put togethers a camera from the materials available at each site (in single case a large tent) and asks the audience to pick an image from books forward performance art that he brings with him. Richards then construct agains the illustrated performance pieces with his audience in style of dresss that he provides and uses the camera lucida to record a specific impetus of the piece. The exposing time is about 10 minutes, for a like reason if people enter the frame halfway end they appear as ghostly neighborhoods in the final photograph. When I viewed the installation, the camera lucida took up nearly the entire exhibition space and Richards was busy making a dispose photograph of the gallery employee He views his works as "performances/documentations" and will point out to the finished print to his audience for feedback as part of the proces Because colors appear as opposites when using the camera lucida, he has begun experimenting with the colors worn through people in the performances to obtain different drifts Richards's images, almost life-sized, bear immediacy, as if the race in them were alive, breathing just behind the photographic paper, their performances ongoing.

Mary McIntyre, whose work was also at the old-fashioned Museum Arts Centre, exhibited pair light-box photographs entitled "Chambers." single in kind 6 x 4 foot photograph was forward the back wall of the small gallery space and depicted an unoccupied council chamber. The other, barely 12 x 10 inches, was hung near the exit from the gallery space and depicted the exit of the council chamber. The extent was painted dark blue and was unlit excluding for the light from behind the boxe illuminating the photographs. Viewers chronicleed the room from around the side of a large false wall blocking the main photograph from view, as if common is entering the space of the photograph. The dark ghastly of the gallery walls stretch outs the space of the photograph at echoing the color of the soft curtains that hang behind a horseshoe-shaped table, entire with worn yet grand leather chairs. makes and colors became emphasized by the agency of the dark gallery. While a critique of authority and the judicial order was implicit in the choice of make liable matter, the image itself failed to impose its personality The small photograph, relative to the cyclopean table, did succeed in giving a apt Alice in Wonderland feeling of needing to escape a confining space if calm through a smaller one.