Unique view of a bygone Ireland

Lifestyle – Images of Ireland in the 1950s by Henry Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and Robert Cresswell are currently on show at the National Museum at Collins Barracks. It’s a rare chance to see work from two of the 20th Century’s leading photographers alongside pictures of Kinvara taken by anthropologist Cresswell during a study of rural Ireland. Its Galway-based curator Fidelma Mullane tells JUDY MURPHY about the show.

The cheerful little boy standing in front of an upturned horse-cart is nonchalantly eating a slice of bread and jam, his appetite unaffected by the scene behind him of a pig being skinned after having its throat cut.

This colour photo isn’t from some far-flung country where slitting a pig’s throat is part of a ritual slaughter.  It’s from Kinvara in the mid-1950s, when killing a pig in this fashion was normal part of rural life. This particular scene was captured by US anthropologist and photographer Robert Cresswell who conducted a major study of the area in 1955 and ’56.

The photo is on show in the National Museum in Collins Barracks, just a stone’s throw from Dublin’s Heuston Station, as part of a major exhibition Ireland in Focus: Photographing the 1950s.

This free show, curated by Galway-based cultural geographer Fidelma Mullane, also features 51 images by the world-renowned French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and work by US-born Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), who is best-known for her Great Depression images, taken in California in the 1930s. Lange visited County Clare in 1954 on a commission from Life Magazine, taking more than 2,400 pictures of the place and its community.

Lange and Cartier-Bresson were two of the world’s leading photographers, plying their trade when real skill was required to take and print photos.

Cresswell’s pictures, meanwhile, were taken for anthropological purposes and his images have a wonderful rawness and immediacy. Because his subjects are from Galway, his images are particularly fascinating for people from this part of the world.

This unique exhibition originated with Cartier-Bresson and Fidelma’s fascination with a photographer whose work was influenced by surrealism and who was a fan of James Joyce.

Cartier-Bresson had captured the liberation of Paris in 1945, and in 1947 he co-founded the renowned international co-operative, Magnum Photos.

He visited India in 1948 after its independence from Britain, to photograph this major transitional period. At that time, Mahatma Gandhi, who had led the independence movement, was on hunger strike in a bid to end violence between Muslims and Christians. Cartier-Bresson had exclusive access to him and captured the protest.

Then, Gandhi was assassinated and Cartier-Bresson’s photo-essay of his funeral became iconic, she explains.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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