The Twelfth – PAWEL BAK

The Twelfth from the Inside

I arrived in Belfast in 2006, one of thousands of Polish workers who came to Northern Ireland in the years following EU enlargement. I settled in a Protestant neighbourhood, worked alongside Protestant colleagues, and over time built friendships that would shape the next decade of my life — and my photography.

It was through these friends that I first encountered the Loyalist marching tradition. I did not come to it as a journalist or an outside observer. I stood beside people I knew, watching something they had grown up with — an annual ritual of identity, belonging, and memory. What struck me most was the intensity of their patriotism and the communal weight of the celebration. Coming from Poland, where expressions of national identity carry a very different historical and emotional charge, I found myself both fascinated and moved.

Between 2007 and 2017 I photographed the marching season across Belfast and beyond — not as a document of political conflict, but as a portrait of a community expressing who they are. These images are made from the inside, with the trust and openness of people who knew me as a neighbour before they knew me as a photographer.

The decade I recorded was not a quiet one. It spans the fragile optimism of power-sharing, the flag protests of 2012–2013, and the renewed uncertainty brought by Brexit. But the core of this work is not political analysis — it is an attempt to understand, with genuine curiosity and respect, what it means to belong somewhere so completely that you march for it every summer.

Rhythm and Ritual

Faces

Community, Space and Symbols

The Eleventh

The Twelfth from the Inside Belfast, 2007–2017

For exhibition, publication and licensing enquiries: mail@pawelbak.com