“IT’S like a hobby that got out of hand,” explains Professor Bill Rolston of his 40-plus years of photographing wall murals around the north and beyond.
“I don’t think of myself as a photographer, and I mean that in a couple of senses: I’ve never trained to be a photographer, which is the most obvious one, but also in the sense that it wasn’t my career.”
Technically, the Belfast man is correct: a well-respected educator by trade, he’s an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Ulster University and was formerly director of its Transitional Justice Institute, having served as a Professor of Sociology from 1977 until 2014.
However, there is no denying that Rolston’s ‘hobby’ has also earned him a reputation as a leading authority on murals in Ireland and overseas, thanks to his Drawing Support series of books – five volumes published between 1991 and 2022 featuring selections of his photographs documenting wall murals on both sides of the north’s political divide – and other tomes in which he has explored politicised urban artwork in the likes of Palestine, Sardinia, Iran, Colombia, Chile and the Basque Country.
“I always joked I was a bit like a butterfly in academic terms,” explains Rolston of how his interest in murals ties in with his academic pursuits.
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“At different points, you’ll see I was writing about housing or sex education or employment. So I never specialised – but I always had an intense interest in society, and always an intense interest in politics. And so that, I think, is the common thread [with murals].
“In time, it came to be that most people who know of me, would say, ‘Oh, you’re Bill Rolston – the mural guy’. But that was my hobby, I never ‘taught’ it, as such. I’ve been invited to speak on it all over the world, but that’s never been what I’ve got paid for.”
Rolston’s reputation as ‘the mural guy’ has just been further cemented by his first ever exhibition, Drawing Support: Murals, Memory and Identity, currently running at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
It features nearly 50 different photos of murals of all natures, from politics to pop culture, taken around the north over the past four decades – including previously unseen images.
While wall murals commemorating William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of The Boyne in 1690 were an established element of the Protestant/unionist tradition in the north dating all the way back to 1908, it took until the hunger strikes of 1981 for republican-themed political wall art to start appearing – which is what first prompted Rolston to pick up his camera.
“There was an explosion of it in the spring and summer of 1981 in Belfast, Derry and everywhere,” he explains.
“I’m originally from Andersonstown, and although I wasn’t living there by 1981, I would have been up visiting my parents a couple of times a week, and the murals were all around. So I just started photographing them.
“I wasn’t systematic about it, but then the hunger strikes were over and the republicans kept painting – so I kept photographing.
“I also began to notice that there had been unionist murals around the whole time that I was growing up which I’d never really paid attention to before. I suppose they’d just been like trees or billboards to me. So, I started photographing them too.
“And then the idea began of just archiving as much as possible. Now, there were other people that had been archiving before me, and some of them were a heck of a lot more systematic than I was back in ‘81. But the main difference is that most of them dropped off, for one reason or the other, whereas I kept on.
“And then the idea of doing a book came about.”
Of course, becoming ‘well known’ can be a double-edged sword in this place, especially during the Troubles when being seen to take a pointed interest in activities explicitly linked to loyalist and republican groups could result in threats, injury or worse.
Impressively, it seems that Rolston managed to shoot thousands of photos of murals in often quite ‘rough’ areas without incident.
Well, mostly, anyway.
“One good thing is that it doesn’t take long to take a photograph of a mural – you don’t have to get it to pose or anything, so I certainly can be quick enough about it,” he says.
“Then the other thing is having a bit of common sense. For example, if there was trouble on a particular street tonight, I wouldn’t necessarily go there tomorrow with a camera. I’d wait a couple of days.”
Rolston adds: “I do remember one occasion where I drove into this loyalist estate to get a mural, which consisted of a pope dressed in green with a ‘no-go’ sign around him – so basically a ‘taigs stay out’ sort of thing.
“I had the kids in the back of the car, and as I got out, a police jeep drove up behind me.
“They said, ‘Move on, sir’. I said, ‘Look, I’m not doing anything illegal, I’m just photographing this mural’ and they said, ‘No, you’re not – get back in the car and get out of here right now’.
“So I drove back out, with the police following behind me. I turned left, they turned right – and I turned left again, drove back into the estate, and took the photo.
“But, as aggro goes, for this place in the 80s, that was nothing.”
With over 40 years of images to choose from in the archives, selecting exactly what went into his debut exhibition was a tricky undertaking, as Rolston explains.
“It was very difficult,” he admits of his collaboration with Rebecca Laverty, curator of Modern History at National Museums NI.
“Rebecca selected a number of images from the five books, and then we started negotiating. I wanted to include a poster of the murals on International Wall at Divis Street using images from five different years, and [the museum] came up with the idea of doing that three-and-a-half metres wide.
“I was really chuffed. I think it works brilliantly, it really draws you in.”
