Donegal County Archives Service
Donegal County Council Archives Service acquired a collection of photographs by Ann Doherty in 2018. Doherty worked as a photojournalist with the Sunday Times Magazine between 1994 and 2005 and documented ordinary people living in extraordinary situations across the world. The Heritage Council awarded Donegal County Archives Service a Heritage Stewardship grant to employ an archivist / curator to work with County Archivist Niamh Brennan and catalogue, digitise, and prepare the collection for exhibition in partnership with Caroline Carr and Judith McCarthy in the County Museum.
Ciarán Walsh began work on the project in July, working alongside Niamh Brennan and Ann Doherty on the selection and digitising of 75 images for exhibition. The second phase of the project gets underway in September when the collection will be catalogued and integrated with six other photographic collections in the archives
With permission of Donegal County Council Archive Services
An exhibition of Ann Doherty’s photographs titled A Common Humanity is scheduled to open in Donegal County Museum in Letterkenny on September 22.
Updates to Follow
The Haddon Dixon Repatriation Project
In 2020, TCD announced plans to deal with its colonial legacy and we asked Provost Paddy Prendergast if he had heard of the stolen skulls held in TCD. The repatriation of these remains would, we proposed, be a good way to start decolonising the campus. He agreed but TCD changed its mind when the Anatomy Dept refused to repatriate the remains. A new round of negotiations with Provost Linda Doyle and her public engagement team on Sept 1, 2022.
Iarsmaí na hIarsmalainne
Iarsmaí na hIarsmalainne means remains in the museums and is the title of a feature documentary currently in pre-production with Deaglán Ó Mocháin’s company Dearcán Media for for TG4 and BBC Northern Ireland. Directed by Damien McCann and produced by Rosie McNally, the film will investigate how how Irish and British museums are re-examining collections of empire related material in response to a vigorous public engagement with colonial legacies in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. my involvement in the Haddon Dixon Repatriation Project is one of three interwoven stories featured in the film.
Updates to follow.
The Bolex Boys
Anyone interested in indie film and photography will have noticed an extraordinary revival of interest in analogue systems for reproducing sound and vision. The handheld Bolex 16mm film camera with its spools of film, wind up mechanism, characteristic shutter clicks, and carousel of lenses embodies all that is analogue for a new generation of young film makers. There couldn’t be a better time to consider the work of an earlier generation of indie film makers who exploited the accessibility and portability of handheld cameras to create an extraordinarily cinematic record of the changing social and cultural landscape of North Kerry from the 1970s onwards. This article introduces the work of John Lynch, Michael Mulcahy and Paul Kennelly, the Bolex Boys of North Kerry.
FOLK
Folk is an oral history of the folk theatre movement that developed in County Kerry in the 1960s and thrived for over three decades.This project has been developed in partnership with Pat Ahern, the leader of that movement. I have recorded a long conversation between February 2019 and the end of the last lockdown in 2021. We have taken the name of that show – Forging the Dance – as a working theme for an ethnographic study of a group of people who developed a style of folk theatre over three decades, building a complex infrastructure that was designed to (a) sustain a tradition of song, music and dance related to folklife and custom in rural Ireland and (b) create a repertoire of folk theatre that captured the spirit of farming communities in culturally distinct districts.
Fairscin Inise / An Island Portrait (2013)
Ciarán Walsh curated ‘An Island Portrait’ in 2012 in partnership with Dáithí de Mórdha, archivist with Ionad an Bhlascaoid Mhóir (The Great Blasket Centre) in Dún Chaoin. The exhibition featured photographs from the archives of Ionad an Bhlascaoid Mhóir. The exhibition covered the period 1892 to 2011, from the earliest known photographs of the island to contemporary photographs of the islanders.
The Irish Headhunter Project (2010-15)
Pat Togher’s great-grandparents emigrated from Mayo as part of the assisted emigration scheme Tuke devised to clear impoverished districts in the county. Togher came to the exhibition of photographs taken by Charles R. Browne in the west of Ireland to see his great-grandparents featured in photographs not included in the reports Browne published. Those encounters happened every time the exhibition was shown and they demonstrate that translation of little known archives into public histories. That became the governing principal of every curatorial project that followed.
The Irish Head-hunter project has a complex history and further work is need before its archive can be linked to this page.
Updates to follow
The Photography of John Millington Synge
In 2007, Ciarán Walsh discovered an album of John Millington Synge’s photographs that Lilo Stephen’s published on the centenary of his death in 1971. He tracked the original negatives to TCD, and Felicity O’Mahony in the Manuscript Library arranged to have them digitised by Tim Keeffe, now head of digital services in the Chester Beatty Library. Walsh commissioned a new set of prints for an exhibition that opened on Inis Meáin in 2009, on the centenary of Synge’s death. Shortly afterwards, Felicity O’Mahony showed Walsh the photographs Charles R. Browne took in the islands in 1892. That was the start of www.curator.ie and the first a series of public engagement projects built around newly discovered photographic archives associated with the Aran Islands.
Synge, 1898, Inishmaan, digital scan by Tim Keeffe (2009) of silver gelatine glass plate negative (1898). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin.
