For centuries, all over the world, scrapbooks have been the most immediate and popular form of visual diary. In Northern Ireland, scrapbooks from the late 1960s to the early 1990s reflected ‘The Troubles’, the regional conflict between Protestants and Catholics.
Inspired by these collectively individual records of everyday life – albums filled with newspaper clippings, family photos and personal memories – acclaimed Belfast-born photographer and filmmaker Donovan Wylie, in collaboration with cultural historian Timothy Prus, created a non-sectarian version of these scrapbooks, with the benefit of hindsight, which chronicles Wylie’s experience of growing up in Belfast in the 1970s and 1980s, as the child of a mixed marriage (his mother Catholic, his father Protestant), during a time when identifying with one side of the religious divide was an assumed and sometimes deadly aspect of everyday life.
