Eyes Open ... Open Wide - A Review

Mention black ‘n’ white photographers and you’re thinking Gered Mankowitz, Anton Corbijn or some other exotic name. You don’t think Gordon Ashbridge. Not yet.

As visual images go, black ‘n’ white’s a powerful medium. Remember Rattle And Hum, where halfway through the film it bursts into colour and it’s like, we’d-forgotten-colour-existed.

That’s simply not possible with Eyes Open…as colour, light and shade pour out of printed word to illuminate the evocative images within the photos, and co-collaborator Steve Stockman’s passions and concerns: take Soaked In A Dearer Wine or U2-inspired Beautiful Day. More Steve Turner than Helen Steiner-Rice, Stockman sometimes eschews rhyme and metre but always infuses reason and meaning.

I suspect that many of us prefer books of poetry to prayer books. But although it’s a poetry book, at times it’s a book of prayers – touching tributes to departed loved ones flow seamlessly into psalm-like laments, committals and cries against injustice: “Lord we have planted our loved ones deep in the bloody earth…we have watered them with our tears”.

Tall, thin, looking like a theatre programme perhaps, Eyes Open... is a slim affair, and one on sale to raise funds for a Habitat For Humanity work in South Africa, something close to Stocki’s heart and hands. It’s also Gordon’s first title and a snapshot of God’s poetic, grace-ful Creation.

(EYES OPEN...OPEN WIDE is a collaboration of poetry and photographs by Steve Stockman and Gordon Ashbridge. All of the proceeds go to Capetownship a project of the Presbyterian Chaplaincy at Queens University through Habitat For Humanity. If you would like to contribute to fighting our enemy - the shack, then send a cheque for £8 payable to Habitat For Humanity NI to Eyes Open..Open Wide, Derryvolgie Hall, 49a Derryvolgie Avenue, BELFAST BT9 6FP, N. IRELAND.)

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