‘I like ‘Border Incident’. I think primarily because it’s a photograph and I love photographs.’

‘It’s obviously very sad because it brings to mind a car bomb and that never has a happy ending, does it?’

‘It’s not necessarily as sad as it would have been if it was in an urban area where there would be more people. In the countryside, in the middle of nowhere, it’s still very sad but other people weren’t affected as well. But there again whoever was in the car died, they were way out on their own and it’s very lonely like that.’

‘The size of the image is so imposing.’

‘The car is so much the focal point that you can’t help but think about the destruction physically of the materials. It’s so in your face that you can’t get away from that. You can look at the hills in the background, but there’s no other feeling apart from pure destruction, sadness and death.’

Willie Doherty was born in 1959 in a town in Northern Ireland that he and other Catholics call Derry, while Protestant neighbours know it as Londonderry. Since the late 1980s he has used cameras to take images of his native town and its surrounding countryside.

As he says: ‘I am writing from a place with two names, Derry and Londonderry. The same place. Here things are never what they seem and always have more than one name.’ The disagreement over the town’s name causes great hurt among people. This may be difficult for some of us to understand this but the whole province of Ulster has been stricken with 300 years of hatred and fear, a name here proves to be important and tells other people who you are.

Burnt out cars can sometimes be seen around Britain, but when seen in Northern Ireland they can give an ominous undercurrent. It is here that the car has taken on the role of weapon in terrorism.