Flats go in the frame at exhibition

Jeanette Lowe’s latest exhibition of photographs is called Waiting. Her collection of 70 to 80 photographs capture a transitory moment in which the Charlemont St Flats close to St Stephen’s Green in Dublin are being demolished — two blocks have been knocked; four remain standing with a few dozen families still living within.

Everyone’s waiting — the council, the residents to see if their new apartments will be built, even the buildings, says Lowe, “seem to be waiting for something to happen.”

Lowe says she wanted “to record something before it disappeared”. The exhibition is held within one of the flats and includes video footage of the demolition job as well as some artefacts left behind.

“When I went into the flats, I just saw the way people had left them. Obviously because they were being demolished, people were told they could leave what they like. They had been moving people out over years. It was quite eerie to go into an empty block of flats and to see a lot of them pretty much in tact as people had lived there.”

On first viewing, one of the striking things about her photographs is the squalor of the living conditions, with their green-stained, mildewed walls, but Lowe stresses that the apartments had been vacated long before she started snapping her camera. There is a haunting quality to the images, a sense of absence, and signs of life not long gone.

Among the flotsam, there is a standing ironing board, a clothesline strewn across a kitchen with oven gloves hanging from it, a TV and remote control idly resting on a table in the corner of a living room. One shot is of a vase with withered flowers, which makes Lowe think of “somebody who had been given roses”.

The first block of flats, the Ffrench Mullen House, was built in 1941 by the architect Michael Scott, as part of a planned series of blocks that were aborted, probably because of the Second World War, reckons Lowe. The other five red-bricked blocks over the five-acre site opened in 1969. In total, 187 flats will be demolished as part of the regeneration project.

“I didn’t expect to find this old community there,” says Lowe. “I think the exhibition is giving people an outlet to talk about their community, which was very strong, and is down to 50 families now. They’re very hopeful that as this process goes on that they can maintain and build up that community in the city again.

“As part of it, I’ve set up a Facebook page where people are starting to give me old photographs. As a photographic artist, it’s easy for me to take photographs and then bring them out to a gallery and show them, but when you bring them into a site-specific place, it becomes a totally different phenomenon.

“On Saturday last, I had a lady that brought in a photograph of her mother on a horse and cart. She’d never lived in the flats, but she lived in Charlemont St. She said she lived in No. 70. When we put that photograph up, lots of people who had lived on Charlemont St, and people who had lived in the flats, were able to comment on it, and were able to say that they remembered her mother, and what a lovely person she was. That’s lovely — you suddenly get people talking, and engaging about a different time in Dublin city.”

- Waiting is part of the PhotoIreland 2014 festival. It runs at Flat 53, Tom Kelly Road, Charlemont St, Dublin 2 until Friday