Growing Up After the Peace Agreement, Under the Weight of What Never Left
Shoot The Frame 2025 Annual Awards (Photo Essay Finalist) — A narrative interview with Toby Binder on long-term documentary work in Northern Ireland, trust, ethics, and what it means to photograph communities shaped by intergenerational tension.
There are places where history stays in museums, and places where it stays in the street. For Toby Binder, Northern Ireland is the latter. Selected as a Photo Essay Finalist in the Shoot The Frame 2025 Annual Awards, Binder’s project documents what it means to grow up in a society that is officially “post-conflict”, yet still structured by division. Walls and fences remain, but the deeper separation is psychological. The young people he photographs were born after the peace agreement was signed, yet they still inherit its unfinished tensions.
Binder’s intent is not to flatten difference, but to complicate it. After years moving between Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, he has found that everyday life often looks far more similar than either side would like to admit. “The working classes on the Protestant and Catholic sides have much more in common in their everyday lives than they would like to admit,” he says. The distance is frequently maintained by something more fragile than ideology. “Often, aversion and hatred are fueled only by prejudices and stereotypes, without any real basis.” His warning is blunt: be careful who you hate, it could be someone you love.
The project began without a grand thesis. “My curiosity,” he says, simply. But curiosity, in this case, meant long-term return. Ten years of showing up, again and again, until the work became less about a visit and more about presence. “I was honest from the start and invested a lot of time,” he explains. “I kept coming back and meeting the same people. In some neighbourhoods, almost everyone knows me now.”
That kind of access changes the work. Binder is photographing young people across time, not as symbols but as lives that keep moving. Some of the teenagers he met early are now working. Others have children. Some have emigrated and returned. Others are in prison, or no longer alive. Alongside them, he photographs the next generation too, noticing shifts that would have been unlikely a decade ago. Interfaith teenage couples are increasingly visible now. Ten years ago, he says, that would have been far harder.
His best thinking happens before the camera comes out. “Definitely before shooting,” Binder says. “Anything coming after is much more feeling than thinking.” The discipline is in preparation and in restraint. He also draws a clear ethical line around what he will not photograph or publish. “I don’t shoot or publish anything that could cause trouble to the people I work with,” he says. “Especially if they are minors.” In long-term documentary work, that kind of care is not a footnote. It is the work.
Ethics, he admits, isn’t tidy in practice. It is one thing to believe in consent, representation, and dignity. It is another to live inside the messy reality of relationships and trust, especially when you meet the young people first and the parents later. Binder describes being laughed at when he asked kids to get their parents to sign consent forms. But then a moment arrived that made the effort feel real. He met a mother he didn’t know on the street. She thanked him for working with her son and his friends. When the book was finished, he says, everyone loved it.
The weight of long-term work is also emotional. When you photograph people you care about, the project stops being abstract. “When something terrible happens to people you care about and work with, even if they die, you start to doubt what you are doing,” he says. The doubt is real. But so is the reason to continue. Binder often works with people whose lives are shaped by difficult conditions and elevated risks. “Pointing this out is what keeps me going,” he says, “so that these people are not forgotten.”
His approach is anchored in patience and composition. He works in black and white, on analogue medium format, and he treats each image as a complete object, even inside a series. “Composition is extremely important to me,” he says. The slow method and the time he spends with subjects lets him position himself deliberately and wait for the right moment.
Editing, then, becomes its own battle. A decade of photographing produces hundreds of images that could belong. Distilling that pool down to 20–25 frames is hard, not because the work is unclear, but because life is abundant and the selection must be ruthless. “Bringing those down to 25–20 pictures is quite difficult,” he says.
There is no single day where Binder claims the story arrived fully formed. He is still searching, still watching the project change as the place changes. Yet he describes a moment of recognition that suggests the work is doing what it was meant to do. When he showed the entire project to the communities in Belfast, an older woman responded with a line that holds the essay’s central insight in plain language: “Ach look, their kids are exactly the same than ours!”
It is the kind of quote you cannot script, and would not want to. It marks the pivot from prejudice to observation, from inherited narrative to lived reality. Binder’s project does not ask viewers to deny difference. It asks them to look long enough to see what else is true.
