THE first photograph is flush with lush colour, bluest skies and a verdant forest pathway. The second depicts a brook, the water silken, the sun going down peacefully, the frame once more in plain wood.

These are postcard scenes you might see in a tourist brochure and yet, on the table in Room One there are books by the names of Lost Lives; Disappeared, The Search For John McConville; An Intimate History of Killing, and, most tellingly, The Lie Of The Land.

While Saddleworth Moor may seem permanently shrouded in mist and rain, even on the sunniest day, as if still grieving for the Moors Murderers' victims, who would know from the Towton landscape today that the bloodiest day of battle in English history took place there? Likewise, I shall never forget the incongruous sight of Polish field workers cutting grass for hay around the huts of Auschwitz.

Landscape is indeed the innocent party, and yet can hide the most guilty and sinister of secrets. Hence Dublin photographer David Farrell's ironically titled series of deceptive and increasingly morbid photographs that chart the search for the bodies of The Disappeared in Southern Ireland.

Between 1972 and 1981, 15 people, young and mainly Catholic, were abducted; in 1999, under the Peace Process amnesty, the IRA revealed the burial sites of nine; only three bodies were found that year, none in a second search in 2000, when the police operation was called off.

Farrell, masking his documentary instincts in high sheen finishes to emphasise the Innocent Landscapes title, follows the path of the search team, charting their growing frustration as they call upon ever heavier equipment.

You could walk the ground floor in innocence, having read nothing about the exhibition, and leave thinking 'nice romantic Irish scenery; time for a cappuccino'. Look closer, and you note the broken twigs and police crime-scene tape running jaggedly across a cornfield.

Climb the stairs, and the loss of innocence will become complete in rooms 3 and 4, the transition indicated by the stairway picture of Oristown Road at twilight: day symbolically moving into the dark foreboding of night. Now that pretty pathway of the first print is lit only by car lamps, as if to say the end is nigh. The flowers are now cut and clustered on impromptu gravestones.

On one road is written Bodies with an arrow pointing to the woods. It turns out to be graffiti by "some local joker", but it has never been removed, standing as another lie on the landscape.

Updated: 14:19 Tuesday, July 01, 2003