In Plain Sight is a powerful and moving exhibition about the legacy of child abuse in Ireland. Made in collaboration with survivors, it is an important and timely challenge to the silence that still surrounds the issue.

The exhibition brings together landscape and portrait photography, family snapshots and audio recordings of survivors’ testimonies. Here, in their own words, survivors recount their stories of love, loss, injustice and forgiveness. Some survivors are photographed revisiting the locations where the abuse took place. These seemingly benign landscapes depict the mundane places of any Irish childhood. Now, however, irrevocably transformed into crime scenes and places of terror, they confront the viewer, raising uncomfortable questions of complicity and guilt and evoke powerful emotions of compassion, admiration, anger and outrage.

The exhibition brings together landscape and portrait photography, family snapshots and audio recordings of survivors’ testimonies. Here, in their own words, survivors recount their stories of love, loss, injustice and forgiveness. Some survivors are photographed revisiting the locations where the abuse took place. These seemingly benign landscapes depict the mundane places of any Irish childhood. Now, however, irrevocably transformed into crime scenes and places of terror, they confront the viewer, raising uncomfortable questions of complicity and guilt and evoke powerful emotions of compassion, admiration, anger and outrage.

Kim Haughton is an award-winning photographer and lecturer now based in New York. Since starting her career at The Sunday Tribune, she has documented social and environmental issues throughout the world and has been commissioned by major international media including The Guardian, The Financial Times, Boston Globe, L’Express and Time. Her work with Irish NGO Concern was exhibited in the Gallery of Photography in 2010. She recently completed an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, exploring the relationship between art and documentary photography, and she has lectured widely on documentary practice. Her image of horses outside an abandoned house was chosen as one of eleven images to feature in the Guardian’s History of Europe in Pictures 1945-2011. She initiated the project ‘In Plain Sight’ in 2011. It received the inaugural Press Photographers’ Association Bursary, and a Project Award from the Arts Council. This is her first solo exhibition.