Suffocated by the Union Jack

When I was about 14, I read an article from the observer magazine about Ulster Loyalist gangs in Belfast. The article was focused around (now disgraced) paramilitary leader Johnny Adair and how the various loyalist organisations eventually turned on each other, corrupted by drug trafficking and bad blood. It was the photography that captivated me most, the gray streets and skies, converging with the bright murals and flags, reflecting so much of the area's tension and violent past: An unwillingness to move on from its bloody history. The place wreaks of death with the smiling faces the dead, staring back from the sides of houses. The incessant flags, painted sidewalks and murals become oppressive, somehow suffocating. The Protestant areas of Belfast: Gothic, romanticised versions of a Britain which has essentially abandoned them. It's a place like no other, somehow frozen in time (similar to Coney Island in that respect) and its for that reason why I'm strangely drawn to it a decade later.