Ciarán Walsh / www,curator.ie is currently working with Don MacMonagle on a piece for the Irish Independent on 100 years of photography by the MacMonagles of Killarney. A centenary exhibition opens in the Library in Killarney on 6 July 2013.
Ciarán Walsh and Con Collins at the launch of The Great Blasket, A Photographic Portrait. June 2013.
The definitive book of photographs of the Great Blasket Island has just been published by Collins Press. The book was authored by Michéal and Dáithí de Mórdha of Ionad an Bhlaoscaoid Mhóir and the photographs were edited by Ciarán Walsh of curator.ie. There are thousands of photographs in the archive of Ionad an Bhlascaoid Mhóir/The Great Blasket Centre. They cover a wide range of material, from private mementoes of families to the work of folklorists, press photographers, and others. The first photographs on the Great Blasket were taken by Alma Curtin in 1891. For the next sixty years or so the islanders and the island would be photographed by all who visited, including the children of people who had emigrated. The result is an extraordinary chronicle of a way of life and kinship, of the life and death of the Great Blasket, evacuated in 1953 but never abandoned. This collection captures the spirit of the island community, from the excitement of discovery by the outside world in the late nineteenth century, through to the decline of the 1940s and the legacy since 1953. Many of these photographs have never been published before.
Micheál de Mórdha, Ciarán Walsh and Dáithí de Mórdha
The photograph shows the ‘Headhunter’ exhibition being installed in The National Museum of Ireland | Country Life in Turlough Park, Castlebar. It features a half plate field camera (c 1895 provided by Chris Rodmell) and a skull sitting on top of a display case while members of the museum’s staff hang the photographs of Charles R Browne in the background. The exhibition was developed by Ciarán Walsh of www.curator.ie and Dáithí de Mórdha of Ionad an Bhlascaoid Mhóir,Blasket Centre, Dún Chaoin, with funding from the OPW and the Heritage Council. Séamas Mac Philib of The National Museum of Ireland | Country Life is the curator. The exhibition runs until May 2013.
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http://www.museum.ie/en/exhibition/the-irish-headhunter.aspx
‘HEADHUNTERS’ IN TRIM
The ‘Headhunter’ exhibition has been touring the west of Ireland since May, starting in the Blasket Centre and moving through Aran, Connemara and on to Meath where it has just opened in the spectacular building that is the headquarters of the OPW – by architect Pat Boyle of the OPW and worth a look in itself. The Headhunter project was developed with support from the OPW.
It is on show there until the 14 December and this is the last chance to see the exhibition in the Pale. It moves back west in December when it goes on show in the National Museum of Ireland, Country Life in Castlebar.
Clár Imeall, the arts and culture documentary programme on TG4, spent the day recording a feature on ‘The Irish Headhunter’ exhibition currently on show in Áras Éanna, the arts centre on Inis Oírr (Inisheer), the Aran Islands. Directed by Maggie Breathnach of Red Shoe Productions and filmed by Andy with contributions by Ciaran Walsh /www.curator.ie, Caomháin Ó Conghaile, Inis Oírr, and Deirdre Ní Conghaile who has just completed a fellowship in the University of Notre Dame. The programme will be broadcast in October 2012.
‘Anthropometry in Aran’ captures Browne and Haddon in action measuring he head of Tom Conneely on Inis Mór, Árann, in 1891. It is one of a small number of photographs of Aran that feature in ‘The Irish Headhunter, The Photograph Albums of Charles R. Browne,’ a project developed by www.curator.ie that opened in Áras Éanna, the arts centre on the island of Inis Oírr on Sunday 1 July, 20.
These are the first images of Aran that are known to exist and form part of a photographic survey of the communities of the western seaboard of Ireland between 1891 and 1900. It is the first time that these photographs have been published and it is probably the most important photographic archive to come into the public domain according to Ciarán Walsh who curated the show with Dáithí de Mórdha.
In 1891 Charles R. Browne and Alfred Cort Haddon (Haddon the Headhunter) arrived in Aran to carry out an ethnographical survey of the Aran Islands on behalf of the Anthropological Museum in Trinity College Dublin, one of a complex of initiatives based in the Department of Anatomy of TCD that were involved in the investigation of the origin of the species in the aftermath of the acceptance by the scientific community of the theory of evolution.
Browne and Haddon, Irish scientists funded by the Royal Irish Academy, had established the Anthropometric Laboratory in TCD and, during the long vacation of 1891, they pitched their tent in Aran and began surveying the ‘natives’ in an attempt to record the typical Aranite. The idea that the population of the British Isles was composed of ‘types’ that could be differentiated through measurable racial characteristics was closely linked to ideas about the origin of the species and social Darwinism in particular – that societies evolve from a primitive to a civilised state. In crude terms, the primitives of Aran were less evolved than the white, Anglo Saxon Protestant as represented by the scientific establishment to which Browne and Haddon belonged. The fact that Aran had once been occupied by ‘Firbolgs’ – a mythical race of small dark, people – had no doubt influenced the decision to begin the survey of the remotest parts of Ireland (na Gaeltachta effectively) in Aran.
After Aran, Haddon returned to Cambridge and became very influential in the development of British anthropology -; earning the nickname ‘Haddon the Headhunter’ in the process. Browne continued with the ethnographic survey of the the western seaboard, carrying on with Haddon’s habit of collecting specimens, the skulls of dead islanders removed from graves and ruined churches in the islands. He became the Irish headhunter, a practice revealed for the first time in this exhibition.
In 1893, Browne and Haddon published the Ethnography of the Aran Islands in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, the first of a series of six reports on the people and their lifetstyle, customs, folklore, archaeology and natural environment of the west coast of Ireland. Combined with the photographs in this exhibition, they form an unprecedented social history of the communities that were surveyed.
