Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage has gone on sale on the Berghahn website with a time-limited discount of 25% available with the code WALS9840.
Haddon and the Aran Islands: An Exhibition at the Royal Anthropological Institute
Andrei Nacu and Ciarán Walsh, curators of the ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ exhibition at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. Photo Hanine Habib.
‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ opens in the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) on 15 October 2023. The exhibition features twenty five photographs that are organised around a slideshow Haddon presented in 1890 and titled ‘The Aran Islands’. It was the first in a series of slideshows that made the islanders visible at a critical moment in the development of cultural nationalism and literary modernism. ‘The Aran Islands’ slideshow is the cornerstone of Ciarán Walsh’s book Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage, which was launched in the RAI on 31 October. Restrictions on ‘illustration‘ limited the number and scale of photographs reproduced in the book and the solution was to show them in an exhibition, mimicking Haddon’s adoption of the slideshow when cost became a barrier to the publication of these photographs in 1890. ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ is about photography and the exhibition features new fine art prints from digitally remastered scans of negatives discovered in 2014. They are framed by a series of photographs that deal with Haddon’s influences and impact. Most of these photographs have never been exhibited before and the exhibition constitutes a radical look at the photographic record of the islands and the origins of visual anthropology.
From nineteenth century photographic negative to twenty-first century digital print: Dixon took this photograph on Inis Meáin in 1890 under direction from Haddon. On his return to Dublin, Haddon sent the negatives to R. J. Welch in Belfast to be processed as lantern slides. Welch returned them and Dixon, it appears, placed them on shelf in a workshop under the anatomy theatre, where they remained undiscovered until 2014. The negatives were in good condition and many still had the original ‘photoshopping’ Welch carried out. By 2019, it was apparent that they needed immediate conservation but the Old Anatomy Steering Group did not have a budget for it and, with their agreement, I commissioned Ciarán Rooney | Filmbank to digitise the negatives. In addition, I commissioned a set of exhibition ready, fine art prints from digitally remastered files. In 2023, Andrei Nacu and I selected 15 of the prints for exhibition in the Royal Anthropological Institute and Andrei made a new set of prints from the remastered digital negatives. We adde ten other prints from collections in Dublin, Belfast, Cambridge and Australia to situate Haddon’s project in a wider experiment that culminated in the first use of colour photography – unsuccessful – and cinematography in ethnographic fieldwork.
The Bolex Boys | Kerry writers’ Museum
’The Bolex Boys’ exhibition takes its name from the famous 16mm camera and profiles the work of independent filmmakers John Lynch & Michael Mulcahy. They created an extraordinary cinematic record of the changing social and cultural landscape of North Kerry from the 1970s onwards. The exhibition opened in Kerry Writers’ Museum on 19 October 2023 with a special screening of a newly digitised and restored copy of their 1971 masterpiece The Way I Remember It, featuring a script Eamon Keane devised and narrated in 1978 in a masterclass of storytelling.
Funded by the Regional Museums Exhibition Scheme 2023, Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
Inishbofin: An Island Funeral
The opening of a grave in a community burial ground marks the end of a ten-year campaign seeking the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls’ of Inishbofin. Community representatives will remove the remains of their ancestors from the ‘Old‘ Anatomy Dept at Trinity College, University of Dublin at 11am on Wednesday 12 July and, following a funeral service at noon in the college chapel, will begin the journey home. The burial will take place at 1pm on Sunday 16 July. MORE
Returning Home: the photographs of Charles R. Browne
Inishbofin Heritage Museum presents ‘Returning Home’, an outdoor exhibition of photographs taken in Inishbofin 1893. The aim is to add living faces to the anthropological collection of human remains that Trinity College, University of Dublin released for burial in 2023. The exhibition includes a photograph Alfred Cort Haddon took of the skulls he stole from St Colman’s Monastery in 1890, which triggered a ten-year campaign for the return and burial of the remains. The exhibition is located on the old pier, the same spot that Charles R. Browne measured the heads of Islanders in 1893 . MORE
“Stolen Skulls” Limited Edition Photograph
The Library of Trinity College, University of Dublin has given Marie Coyne and Inishbofin Heritage Museum permission to print a limited edition of 100 fine art prints of the photograph Alfred Cort Haddon took in St Colman’s Monastery on 16 July 1890. MORE
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.
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.
The Skull Measuring Business (2015 – 2020)
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 (2010-23)
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.