Megan Doherty: Stoned in Melanchol, long nights in Derry

Stoned in Melanchol

Days in Derry are long, Doherty has said, and there is not a great deal to do except hang out and waste time. Making pictures was her form of escape: she has described being restless, bored and claustrophobic, having walked every street a million times, when she first picked up a camera.

Her friends became the way out. The more she photographed, the more people she met, and they brought her into a world that was surprising and electric. Her own account of the project is unusually clear-eyed about the transaction involved — she describes imposing her ideas of youth, freedom, beauty and rebellion onto the landscape of small-town life, which is a more honest description of what youth documentary usually does than the genre normally allows.

In several ways the series is a work of fiction. The people are real and the place is specific, but they are also a fantasy. Doherty has noted that she does not appear in any of the photographs, and that this absence is exactly how she is present in them: the book is a route map to Derry's underground scene and a tour of her own daydreams at the same time.

Boredom, friendship and the alternative family

The subject underneath the aesthetic is freedom, and the universality of being young and bored. The work explores identity, friendship and belonging, and the way an alternative family gets built out of friends on the basis of shared interests and mutual understanding. It is about collectively navigating small-town living and a shortage of opportunity, about the claustrophobia of suburbia, short summers spent in the park and long winters spent in strangers' houses — and about finding the means to escape.

That framing is what distinguishes it from a straightforward nightlife series. The photographs record a specific scene in a specific city at a specific moment, and the argument they carry is that the scene existed because there was nothing else to do.

The book and the practice

Setanta Books released the work as a limited edition: a fifteen-by-thirty-centimetre box containing fifty images across twenty-five double-sided A3 folded colour posters with text inserts, and an introduction by the Firecracker founder Fiona Rogers. Three different covers were produced, limited to eighty copies each, for a total print run of two hundred and forty.

Doherty is a photographer based in Derry and a graduate of the University of Ulster whose work uses a variety of media to create alternate realities celebrating youth, subculture and freedom. She has contributed to Vice, Dazed & Confused, the British Journal of Photography, Huck, New York Magazine and the Sunday Times in Ireland, and has exhibited in France, London and across Ireland.

She won the Ten and One Annual Lomography Award in 2017 and was a nominee for the Magnum Photos Graduate Photographers Award in 2016.

The physical form of the release matters to what the work is. Fifty images across twenty-five double-sided folded posters in a box, in a print run of two hundred and forty, is not a book that gets read in sequence — it is a set of surfaces to be pulled out and rearranged, which is a fair analogue for the nights it records.

It is also a reminder of the scale most photobooks actually operate at. A widely discussed debut in documentary photography can mean a few hundred copies, which is why the funding question runs through every entry in this archive.

Stoned in Melanchol also marks a generational shift in where a photographic language comes from. Doherty's cinematic register — saturated colour, artificial light, night exteriors that read like film stills — belongs to a cohort that learned pictures from screens and shared them the same way, and Derry gave that language something the imagery it borrows from rarely has: a fixed address. The tension between the two is the work's real subject matter. The frames promise an anywhere of neon and freedom; the captions and the geography keep insisting on a small city with walls, weather and history. A photographer with more options would have gone somewhere more photogenic, and the work would have been poorer for it — the daydream needs the boredom underneath to mean anything, and the boredom is the part only a local could photograph accurately.