Ross McDonnell

Ross McDonnell, from the series "Joyrider"

      Today's New York Times Lens blog features the series "Joyrider" by photographer Ross McDonnell. "Joyrider" depicts the harsh world of Ballymun Flats, a housing project on Dublin's north side. McDonnell's image of a young man holding a fragment of a Scarface poster encapsulates the culture of drugs, violence, and tight-knit brotherhood that seems to characterize life in the Ballymun Flats.
      The photograph depicts three young men in tracksuits inside a car, while a fourth young man, in only a t-shirt, leans into the window. The man closest to the camera grips a narrow photograph of Al Pacino from the film Scarface.* The photograph is mounted on corrugated cardboard, as if it has been cut from packaging or a store display. As he presses the photograph against his upraised knee, the young man stares at it intensely, his mouth open as if in mid-thought or mid-sentence. His left hand splays across the Pacino character of Tony Montana and McDonnell sets the poster as the strongest diagonal in the image, connecting the top and bottom of the frame. Both the gesture and the angle force us to focus, along with man holding it, on a ruthlessly violent anti-hero worshipped for his criminal achievements.
      While the classic black and white tones, and even the dated poster of Scarface, create a timeless atmosphere, the tracksuits, baseball cap, and haircuts, drag the image solidly into the present. The glamorization (or at least utilization) of guns and drugs, symbolized by the Scarface poster, are not a thing of the past; they are a very real and everyday part of these young men's lives. The communal obsession with Scarface, the similarity of dress, and the close confines of the car interior tie the four men together, for better or most likely, for worse.
      McDonnell's photograph works well as part of the larger "Joyrider" series but it also stands powerfully as a single image; for me it was the most important image in the whole series. It gave me a unique insight into the Ballymun gang culture, how the icons of popular culture can help young men justify lawlessness. While McDonnell states that many of these men have moved on to more productive lives, in part due to the urban renewal of the area, in the suspended moment of this photograph they have chosen Tony Montana's future, quite literally a "dead" end.

-Professor Ray

*author's note: I have never actually seen Scarface. My description of it, as used in this entry, is based on Scarface's presence in popular culture.