Dark Rooms and Developing Fluid

Chapter 3 explores the practices of photography clubs. Throughout Ireland, during the twentieth century, men and women spent their evenings in the dark rooms of photography clubs, and their weekends on days out to historic sites and beauty spots organized by these groups. As such, these organizations played an important role in mediating ideas of photographic value, technical perfection, and the picturesque. This chapter explores their history, and uses the way photography was taught to explore the relationship between photographic aesthetics and how society and people were envisioned through landscape. Until the late 1960s, the photographic conventions propounded by organizations such as the Photographic Society of Ireland and the Belfast Central Camera Club tended towards conservatism in both content and style. Amateur enthusiasts in general adhered to the pictorial tradition of studied set pieces—of sweeping hills or the curve of a beach offset by a white cottage—cropped and adapted to reach a standard of technical formalism and perfection in line with conventions derived from painting. Moreover, discussions of the respective merits of documentary and pictorial styles for depicting landscape within the amateur photographic press, although framed as aesthetic arguments, encompassed bigger issues. Correspondents debated their ability to respond to the upheavals of European modernity and their responsibility to depict uncomfortable themes through photography. As such, concerns about style became broader arguments regarding Ireland’s position within Europe, the boundaries of society, and the nature of the visible within Irish life.

Beaches and Sunlight

Chapter 1 explores the practices and semiotics of photograph albums. Across the twentieth century, making photograph albums moved from an elite to a popular form, and was especially popular among single young people. Familial and personal histories were curated through selecting photographs, arranging them on the page, and fixing their meaning through captioning. In order to unpack these themes in detail, the chapter focuses on photograph albums depicting three ‘ordinary’ Irish lives. These photograph collections can provide us with a host of information about Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century: about how people used a visual language to narrate their lives; received, assimilated, or resisted social and political discourses; and revealed or concealed family secrets. Each of the subjects made particular choices about the stories they told in their albums, drawing on photographic modes drawn from Kodak convention and the visual rhetoric of Ireland.

Introduction

The introduction sets up the story which will be told in the following five substantive chapters. It provides an introduction to the history of Irish photography in the twentieth century and explores how it has been understood by historians. It then goes on to lay out the argument which will be developed throughout the rest of the book. That is, over the course of the twentieth century, photography allowed ordinary Irish people to create spaces of self-expression and contest authority in ways which would have a fundamental impact on the nature of Irish society, and that reading photographic sources can provide us with a new way in to stories of social and cultural change from the perspectives of those on the margins of power.

Power and Place

Chapter 6 surveys the history of documentary photography in twentieth-century Ireland. In particular, it examines the emergence of a new generation of documentary photographers and their role in debates about the nature of Irish society from the 1970s to the 1990s. Self-consciously radical, these photographers aimed to use their work to expose injustice and ‘reveal’ the hidden side of Irish life. In particular, the chapter focuses on the career of three photographers: Derek Speirs, Joanne O’Brien, and Frankie Quinn. It uses close readings of the work of these photographers, contemporaneous photography magazines, coupled with the extensive use of oral histories to explore the impact of documentary photography on Ireland in the later twentieth century. In their depiction of poverty as both visceral and uncomfortable, they challenged the traditional iconography of Ireland which had aestheticized or even eulogized these themes. Moreover, these photographers were often self-conscious and reflective regarding the relationship between themselves and the people—often in difficult circumstances—whom they portrayed. Nevertheless, they were often forced to make difficult choices about the depiction of poverty, violence, and injustice which attempted to expose societal problems without being voyeuristic. An exploration of choices they made regarding how they engaged with their subjects, what they photographed, and where they published provides a way of exploring the visual economies of social justice in later twentieth-century Ireland.

Community and Representation

Chapter 4 explores community photography and the new radicalism it brought to amateur photographic practice during the 1970s. This movement, begun in London and disseminated through the pages of Camerawork magazine, propounded the potential of photography as a form of collective action which could bring communities together and empower individuals. Through groups such as the Shankill Photographic Workshop, Derry Camerawork, and the NorthCentre City Community Action Project, activists taught photography to community organizations, as well as prisoners, the unemployed, and women’s groups. This new form of photographic activism served a variety of functions. It was a form of practice that brought people together and taught unemployed and demoralized residents of the inner-city skills and self-respect. It enabled communities that had become the object of a media gaze which turned their lives into stereotypes to create representations of themselves, which they felt more accurately reflected the reality of their lives. In these evening classes and dark rooms, photography became a mechanism of raising consciousness and building communal cohesion. Moreover, it provided a way of making sense of the agglomeration of power, class, and gaze which rendered the lives of the unemployed, or inner-city residents only as ‘types’, and so provided these new photographers with a way of critiquing—if not resisting—these processes.

Clasped Hands and Clear Complexions

Chapter 2 explores the portrait studio, which defined many Irish people’s experience of family photography for much of the twentieth century. Familial milestones were commemorated by photographs of people in their Sunday best posing stiltedly in front of painted backdrops depicting domestic anywhere-spaces. In particular, it examines two studio portraitists in Waterford in the mid-twentieth century, run by the Poole family and Annie Brophy. Poole catered to the wealthier rural elite, while Brophy’s clientele were predominantly the shop owners of Waterford and small farmers of the district. These photographers were united in how they recorded the rhythms of town and country in a way which remained markedly consistent, through these portraits creating an image of a respectability—that profoundly visual quality—in rural Ireland. The repeated patterned similarities between images, in particular, the recurrence of objects and clothes, shows how portraitists kept props, and how those within the frame participated in the restaging of their lives in front of the lens for display both within the home and to circulate amongst extended family. Moreover, close examination of the marks on the negative reveals how blemishes were removed, hair was thickened, and skin was smoothed, and shows how the photography was manipulated in order to create appropriate families for display and viewing. An exploration of the construction of the studio portrait provides a way to explore how social norms were understood, and how the families sitting for these photographs aspired to reach these standards.

Conclusion

Snapshot Stories concludes as the twentieth century ends, and paper photographs and analogue cameras are replaced by digital images and new technologies. However, the final chapter provides an examination of how some of the themes explored throughout the earlier chapters have adapted since the close of the century. Indeed, it is arguable that the themes addressed throughout this book have only become of greater relevance in the twenty-first century, as the visual has increasingly played a more pressing role in everyday life and political culture. Photograph albums have now been deposed by photographs on social media as a forum for displaying and curating identity. The photographers who stood with their cheap cameras on top of Derry tower blocks in 1969 today seem to be the ancestors of activists who record police violence on smartphones. However, just as the shift to the digital is producing an image saturated culture which seems to offer new modes of political participation and personal self-fashioning, it also poses fundamental questions for the historian. Online databases of images open up newly accessible source bases, but they also require new methods to work in them, while the certainties of cutting, pasting, and annotating of photograph albums and framed photographs have now disappeared in the new image-culture of the twenty-first century. The final pages of the book bring all these themes together by briefly examining photo culture in modern Ireland, scrutinizing how archival practices are changing, historical questions are being reshaped, and looking ahead to the challenges and potentials for the future of work on photography.

Flesh and Blood

Chapter 5 explores how people used photographs to make sense of violence. From the late 1960s, there is a notable increase in the number of people going out onto the streets with newer, faster, lightweight cameras, to record crime and injustice. In so doing, they attempted to provide those without power with a new way of holding authority to account. However, the impact of their photographs was not always as they anticipated. The central focus of this chapter is on the collection and use of images at the Scarman Tribunal, which investigated the disturbances of the summer of 1969, and the Widgery Tribunal, which sought to ascertain the sequence of events surrounding Bloody Sunday. Through close readings of how photographs were used at these two tribunals, the chapter explores how the existence of certain photographs served to anchor discussions of trajectories of violence around certain places and moments, illustrates how photographs taken for publication in newspapers were reread as evidential documents, and indicates the range of plausible truths each photograph was understood to provide. Photographers, who saw themselves and their medium as working to tell stories of injustice, instead found that their images were read to reinforce the actions the state and security forces had already taken.