Victor Sloan made the Promenade. Bangor series of works by walking along the sea front at Bangor in County Down. He held his pre-focused 35mm camera by his side, and as he passed people walking, he took a picture. He is conveying the bleakness, coldness and unchanging nature of a seaside promenade in winter.


Promenade, Bangor IV, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 17cms x 17cms, 1984


From the beginning Victor Sloan has also sought to alter our relationship to the photographic image, it should be said, by consistently undercutting a predictable compositional aesthetic, formulating and emphasising the apparently casual, oblique qualities of his own imagery. Yet what this amounts to is, inevitably, partly a formalist achievement, in that it indicates a novel way of seeing, spectacularly so in the case of the Moving Windows series, for example, which are in formal terms outstanding.

One could say that his general pictorial approach is to continually casualise the pictorial organisation of his subject matter, with the aim of pulling it out of whatever narrative and iconographic frame we might be tempted to slot it into, thus denying us our habitual sense of detachment and control.



Promenade, Bangor V, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 17cms x 17cms, 1984


In a certain sense his photographs of the promenade at Bangor, made in 1984, can be seen as a continuation and development of the zoo pictures. The holiday resort is a contrived setting in which people indulge in certain predetermined recreational activities and behaviours. Sloan concentrates on one repetitious habitual activity enacted by out-of-season visitors, that of walking up and down the promenade.

This gives him the unchanging, bleak backdrop of the winter sea, a stage against which figures come and go, and are glimpsed obliquely. He particularly cherishes one composition in which a little girl is being pulled along by her mother, partly because it corresponds to what he was trying to do visually, and partly, one is tempted to conclude, because of the implicit motif, of a child being coerced or cajoled into a set pattern of behaviour.

Extract from A Broken Surface: Victor Sloan's Photographic Work by Aidan Dunne in Victor Sloan: Selected Works 1980-2000, published by Ormeau Baths Gallery and Orchard Gallery, January, 2001.



Promenade, Bangor VI, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 17cms x 17cms, 1984



Promenade, Bangor III, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 17cms x 17cms, 1984



Promenade, Bangor I, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 17cms x 17cms, 1984



Promenade, Bangor II, silver gelatin print, toner and gouache, 17cms x 17cms, 1984