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 Board of Trinity College Dublin
in association with
Trinity College Dublin, The Royal Irish Academy, Ionad an Bhlascaoid Mhóir / The Blasket Centre, Mairéad Ní Ghallchóir (Áras Éanna, Inis Oírr, Árann), Jane Maxwell (TCD), Tim Keefe (TCD), Justin Carville (IADT Dún Laoghaire), Ciarán Rooney (FILMBANK Colour Management) and Séamas Mac Philib, The National Museum of Ireland – Country Life.
How did one explain the presence of a primitive (white) race living in the back yard of the United Kingdom – at the height of the British Empire? Scientists based in Trinity College Dublin attempted to do just that by documenting the physical characteristics and habits of communities in the remotest parts of Ireland. Starting in Aran in 1891, they moved along the west coast and finished up in Carna in 1900. The whole thing was recorded by Charles R. Browne and his associates on a new generation of portable cameras using plates and rolled film, the latest in photographic technology at the time. They took more than photos however, they were the Irish ‘headhunters.’
Alive or dead the head of the Irish native was at the centre of all of their research, cranial capacity (brain size) and physiognomy being regarded as the key to unlocking the mystery of the origins of the Irish race. Specimens – the skulls of dead islanders – were collected and lodged in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy in TCD. Live heads were also taken … with a camera. These anthropometric portraits were contextualised with photographs of “the occupations, modes of transport, and habitations of the people, also several of the antiquities of the district, and a set of views showing surface of land and nature of coastline, etc.”
‘Charles R. Browne The Irish Headhunter’ exhibition will present in exhibition, for the first time ever, the photographs collected by Charles R. Browne. These are held in the Research Collection and Manuscripts Library of Trinity College Dublin. They have been scanned and reproduced especially for this exhibition and it is the first time most of them will have been seen in public.
This is probably the most important photographic archive to come into the public domain. It is supported by written reports – ethnographies – that are held in the Royal Irish Academy. Browne’s archive is singular in terms of its depiction of life on the west coast of Ireland in the 1890s. The anthropological inquiry – and the headhunting – that motivated it is one of the best kept secrets in Ireland.
