When Akihiko Okamura saw Ireland for the first time, in 1968, he likened the country to “a large cold black lump of soil.” Okamura, who had made a name for himself as a war photographer in Vietnam, soon found Ireland to be a haven. He relocated his family to Dublin and spent the next 16 years shooting everyday life on the Emerald Isle. Those photographs inevitably took in the Troubles, the violent ethno-nationalist conflict that destabilized Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998. Okamura captures the surreal nature of the conflict: well-dressed women in kitten heels walking past burnt-out buildings; British soldiers in riot gear standing on the well-manicured lawn of a Derry estate; two little girls with purses approaching a makeshift shrine for a killed civilian. Stark, unsettling, poetic. —Paulina Prosnitz