Bombay Street-Taken from the Ashes

Bombay Street-Taken from the Ashes

A historically unique series of photographs, taken by an eyewitness and never before seen collectively in public, will commemorate the 40th anniversary of a tragic watershed in the history of Northern Ireland, at Belfast’s Red Barn Gallery.

The exhibition features a unique and previously unseen, black and white images, which were taken by amateur photographer Gerry Collins the morning after a Loyalist mob razed the west Belfast road, forcing the inhabitants to flee and prompting the emergence of the Provisional IRA.

The Red Barn Gallery director, Frankie Quinn (himself a highly respected Belfast photographer) says: “Forty years after the Bombay Street incident I was presented with a box containing 50 stunning images, which had never been seen in public before.”

“These images are the only existing record of that fateful night, and they provide a forceful, eloquent and historically significant first-hand view of its impact.”

“Visitors comments”, said the Gallery, “have remarked on ‘an epitaph of hatred’ and to a street, ‘murdered by hatred’, as well as expressing ‘a pride in survival’ and the hope that such devastating scenes will ‘never be seen again’.

The gallery is in the process of collecting people’s memories of the time and welcomes all recollections, verbally and in writing.

The exhibition runs from June 26, thru July 25.

After its Red Barn premiere, the exhibition will be shown at the West Belfast Festival.

For further information: theredbarngallery@gmail.com