innovate | engage | excite

I set up curator.ie in 2010 as a vehicle for innovative curatorial projects with a strong public engagement component and collaborative ethos. I specialise in bringing long-forgotten or overlooked photographic archives and collections into the public domain, usually through exhibitions curated in partnership with arts and heritage organisations. Along the way I have curated several landmark projects in terms of the history of social documentary photography in Ireland. These are never retrospective. Legacies matter. Recovering forgotten photographs happens in the present and demands that we engage with contemporary practice

All is connected: placing Haddon and Synge at the centre of a long experiment in photography in Aran Islands (© Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie).

Innovation?

I specialised in social documentary photography as a student in the National College of Art and Design. I joined in 1978 and graduated in 1984. The college was was still finding its way after a student revolution in 1971 overthrew the old regime. Photography was recognised a a fine art at degree level for the first time.

One year later, BBC broadcast John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. It became the go to text for anyone studying photography. I learned two things from Berger. The first is that all photography is situated in power and politics. The second is the montage as a method for analysing photographs and their framing.

That separates me from most academics who have looked at the history of photography in Ireland. I approach  photographs from the point of view of a photographer, rather than as tokens of “gaze” or “otherness”. I try to put myself behind the camera and imagine why the photograph was take this way?

It’s a deceptively simple question. The history of social documentary photography in Ireland is inseparable from the struggle for Home Rule and the revolution that followed its failure. Conventional histories have favoured a binary scheme of antagonists: Colonial agents photographed natives in the service of empire.

I was much more interested in the development of new technologies that made social documentary possible in the 1890s  That’s what fascinated me. Most photography[hs of . I was also interested in the networks that looked to the west of Ireland for photographic subject matter. I didn’t  start with a theory of representation and seek photographic evidence to support it. I tried to imagine the taking of the photograph as a route to possible meanings then and now.

That was how I approached my first project in 2007. I worked with the Manuscripts Library in TCD on an internationally acclaimed exhibition of photographs Johnny Synge took in the Aran Islands in 1898 with a second-hand Rover falling plate camera. No one else had look at these photographs since Lilo Stephens published an album in 1971.  It was the beginning of at long exploration of colonial legacies. It was also the model for a series of landmark projects that have changed the way we look at the history of social documentary photography in Ireland.

Collaborative ethos?

I specialise in bringing long-forgotten or overlooked photographic archives and collections into the public domain, usually through exhibitions curated in partnership with arts and heritage organisations. My collaboration with TCD continued with a truly groundbreaking projects on the photography of the “Irish Headhunter” Charles R. Browne (1867-1931).

Browne managed the Irish Ethnographic Survey, which operated out of TCD between 1892 and 1900. Every ‘long vacation’ he headed west to a remote district to conduct a survey of the people and their way of life.  He began with a photographic survey that covered topography, people, modes of life and archaeology.

In 1897 he compiled a series of albums as a photographic record of the work of the survey. The first is an extraordinary record of skull-measuring expedition to the Aran Islands in the company of Alfred Cort Haddon (1855-1940). The albums were “lost” when Browne moved to England in 1902. Some of the photographs survived in ethnographic reports published by the Royal Irish Academy. These emphasised photography as a form of skull-measuring. They are also intensely political. The ragged nature of unassimilated natives questioned the capacity for Home Rule in Ireland.

Gwendolen Browne returned her father’s albums to TCD in 1995. TCD Librarian Felicity O’Mahony gave me access to the albums as we wrapped up the Synge project. The skull measuring was a dilemma for TCD because of its colonial legacies. However, the systematic documentation of folk life in Ireland was unique. It was too important to ignore and we decided to publish the albums in an exhibition that would tour the districts Browne surveyed.

Dáithí de Mórdha came on board as co-curator. He was the archivist in Ionad an Bhlascaoid Mhóir and immediately recognised the value of Browne’s photographs of The Great Blasket Island and Dún Chaoin. We put together a consortium that included the Heritage Council, the Royal Irish Academy  and the Office of Public works, Royal Irish Academy, The National Museum of Ireland – Country Life,  an arts centre in the Aran Islands, Oireachtas na Gaeilge and the Haddon Library in Cambridge. The exhibition opened in Dún Chaoin in 2012 and followed Browne’s footsteps up the the west coast. It transferred to Cambridge before finishing in the National Museum in Castlebar in 2013.

Browne led to Haddon. His 1890 photographic partnership with Andrew Francis Dixon (1868-1936) was at the centre of a ten-year project that turned the conjoined history of photography and anthropology in Ireland on its head. Again, this project involved the mobilisation of a network of individuals and agencies..

More importantly, it marked the beginning of a ten programme of engagement with the community in Inishbofin. That speaks to the centrality  of engagement all the projects I curate.

Public Engagement

Marie Coyne is the founder and director of Inishbofin Heritage Museum. She visited the ‘Headhunter” exhibition in The National Museum in 2013. The photograph of Browne measuring heads on Inishbofin had become a slightly notorious poster for the project across all media. She learned that Haddon had stolen the remains of thirteen individuals from a community burial ground on the island. She emailed me asking if I could help secure the return an burial of the remains of her ancestors. 

It was a simple request, but it took ten years to resolve.

TBC.

Legacies

The recovery of lost collections of colonial era photographs inevitably raises the politics of representation. Who represents who? What do photographs reveal about the power relations between the photographer and the person being photographed? What does that say about the nature of photography?

I first became interested in the politics of historical social documentary photography – ethnography if you like –  when I worked as Visual Arts Director of the National Folk Theatre of Ireland. Authenticity is always an issue when talking about folk theatre. The tricky interaction between  tradition, remembrance and identity in a contemporary arts setting is most acute when comparing staged folk theatre with the evidence of ethnographic photography.

In classical anthropological language, there are two days of seeing. One, the subjective representation of folklife experience from within – the emic approach.  Two, the trained eyed of an external observer – the etic approach. Which is more real? In 2007 I wrote a very naive piece for an academic collection of essays on how the west of Ireland was framed by photographers like Robert John Welch. I was fascinated by the second life his ethnographic photographs achieved as tokens of authentic folk life almost a century after they were taken.

TBC

John Joly, c1896, Vase with Flowers (© Adrian Dixon Collection).

Turning a mediaeval castle into a community cinema: OPW’s monument care team with Rushes | Luachair  curator Laura Fitzgerald at a screening of Lorraine Neeson’s artwork Raven on 31 January 2026. L-R: Charlie Broderick, Paul Moynihan, Jim Counihan, Mike Moynihan, Laura Fitzgerald and artist Chris Steenson. (photo Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie).

Laura Fitzgerald installing her work in the Maurice Walsh exhibit at Kerry Writers’ Museum (photo: Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie)

In 2025 Kerry Writers  acquired a remarkable collection of photographs that Tony Fizmaurice took between 1954 and the early 2000s.
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Tony Fitzmaurice, circa 1960, Untitled, 35mm Kodak Safety black and white negative scanned by Kathy and Steve Reynolds.