Tamara puts Traveller childhood in the spotlight

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

When documentary photographer Tamara Eckhardt first came to Galway, hoping to work with members of the Travelling community, she visited a church. Back then, she didn’t know any Travellers but she knew religion was important to them and this might be a way of making connections.

She did, via a man named Paddy, with whom she struck up a friendship. He introduced her to the eight families at Carrowbrowne Halting Site on the outskirts of the city and the result is a striking exhibition at Galway City Museum – inside and out.

That meeting happened in 2019, when Tamara and her dog drove from her home in Germany to Ireland. She didn’t have much money and slept on a mattress in the back of her car but Tamara, now aged 26, who’d lived in Ireland as a child, had a plan.

“When I started studying photography, I wanted to return and experience Ireland through my work,” explains Tamara, a graduate of Ostkreuzschule for photography in Berlin, who heard about the Travelling community by accident. Previously, in Germany she had documented young, single mothers and their children in a poor part of Berlin. So it’s not surprising when she says her main interest is in documenting the lives of minority and marginalised social groups.

Her own childhood left her with a curiosity “about how people grow up differently in different communities”.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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