When William Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, published his first album of images in 1844, he inscribed a verse from Virgil's Georgics on the title page: "It is a joyous thing to be the first to cross a mountain." Sarah Rouse might well have used the same quote to introduce her new, ground-breaking guide to the National Photographic Archive, Into The Light.
Rouse spent six months between 1996 and 1997 researching the archive at the National Library of Ireland on a Fulbright Scholarship. A veritable mountain of material awaited her - including the second published part of Fox Talbot's album. Previous publications based on the archive have been selective and, though much of the material is to some extent accessible to scholars, hers is the first systematic account of the whole collection.
She brought with her a fund of experience gained working with photographs at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, and applied it to close on 90 collections totalling something like 300,000 photographs, "the largest collection of Irish photographs in the world". It all makes up, as she puts it, "a sweeping visual history of Ireland, and each collection tells its own story".
The publication of the guide coincides with the opening the National Library Photographic Archive building in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, overseen by Assistant Keeper, Grainne MacLochlainn. "When Sarah began work, we thought there were perhaps 40 collections in the archive. As we discovered, we have about 80 substantial collections, so the guide has already been of huge value, even to the staff here - they each have their own well-thumbed copy at this stage."
Many of the "substantial collections" are very substantial indeed. The best publicised to date, so much so that it is virtually synonymous with the National Library's photographic holdings, is the Lawrence Collection, running to tens of thousands of glass negatives, prints and printing blocks, mostly of topographic views of Ireland made between 1865 and 1914. It provided material for Kieran Hickey's popular picture book and film, The Light of Other Days - and could fill many such volumes.
The other Lawrence collection - the Lawrence Photographic Project - is a fascinating footnote to its precursor. In 1990, some 77 professional and amateur photographers set out to re-photograph the locations that feature in the original Lawrence images. The over 1,000 photographs that resulted document the changes in the intervening period.
Even apart altogether from the Lawrence, other collections amount to a topographical treasure trove. There are 5,000 images of towns and cities between 1940 and 1960 in the Cardall Photograph Collection. The Eason Photograph Collection comprises over 4,000 glass negatives of views from all over Ireland, taken during the first four decades of the century, the originals for postcards widely marketed under the Signal imprint. About 3,000 glass negative represent Valentine postcards, which were produced between 1903 and 1960. Those garish icons of 1960s Ireland, John Hinde postcards, are represented in the form of almost 500 images.
The Kilkenny Architectural Photograph Collection provides an exemplary record of Kilkenny in 1946. Over 100 prints and negatives were taken by an Englishman, O.G.S. Crawford, who visited the city to lecture the Archaeological Society, which had been recently revived by Hubert Butler. Impressed with the quality of the architectural environment, and certain that modernisation would eventually degrade it, he decided to record things as they were.
Some of the earliest images are contained in The Kilronan albums, dating from 1858. They were made by Louisa Tenison and her husband, Edward King Tenison, and include good quality topographical views from many parts of the country. Robert J. Welch recorded life in the West and Northwest for the Congested Districts Board between 1906 and 1914 in a series of high quality prints.
As researchers have discovered, a number of specialist collections are invaluable resources. James P. O'Dea's thousands of images document the railways in Ireland from 1937 to 1967. Thomas J. Westropp's albums, complied between 1898 and 1921, record antiquities across the country - another Westropp album records Dublin in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.
A pity that the Abbey Theatre Collection doesn't run to more than 150 prints, but it is extremely useful all the same. It is to some extent augmented by the William G. Fay Collection. He was the actor-manager who helped to establish the Abbey. He left Ireland in 1908 to work in the US and England. Painter Harry Kernoff's collection documents cultural life in Dublin in the 1940s and 1950s.
The Luftwaffe Collection numbers just 16 prints, but they have a sinister edge. They are aerial reconnaissance photographs of Dublin from 1940, prior to the apparently accidental bombing of the city the following year. Also airborne, but entirely benign, the Morgan Aerial Photograph Collection marshals nearly 3,000 large format negatives of Ireland seen from the air. They were taken by Alexander Campbell "Monkey" Morgan between 1954 and 1957, and many were published in the Irish Independent at the time. Morgan himself was, tragically, killed when his plane crashed near Shannon Airport in 1958.
As Rouse observes, there is no known photographic record of the Great Famine. Photography was in its infancy and the media of mass visual communication were still the woodcut and the engraving. But within very few years all that was to change. By the 1880s not only current events but every aspect of life and environment were routinely recorded in camera. The Coolgreany Evictions Album, for example, records evictions on the Brooke estate at Coolgreany, near Gorey, Co Wexford in 1887, and includes portraits of evicted families. Virtually as soon as Daguerre, Fox Talbot and the other pioneers had devised workable ways of fixing photographic images, they found there was a boundless public appetite for low cost photographic portraits. It is an appetite that has if anything increased since. The new technology brought within the reach of ordinary people what had been reserved for the elite. Our family histories are enshrined between the covers of photograph albums. So it is hardly surprising that portraits account for a great deal of the material in the archive.
As in every other major city in the latter half of the 19th century, there were numerous portrait studios flourishing in Dublin, on the " `photographic mile' of Grafton, Westmoreland, and (then) Sackville streets." There are obvious limits to our interest in portraits of anonymous strangers but, as Rouse emphasises, particularly given the existence of contemporary record books, they are social documents and can be extremely useful for historians and biographers.
Something like the Kenneth Edgeworth Collection amounts to a fascinating piece of history in itself. It is a wide-ranging visual record of the photographer's life and career, including service during the Boer War and travels in Africa as well as events closer to home. The Haffield Albums, as well, recording life for the Haffield and Archer families between 1860 and 1930, is crammed with details of contemporary life around Dun Laoghaire and in Co Meath.
It's a different story once the portrait subjects are public figures, and there are several personal collections of great historical interest, including those of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Richard Mulcahy and Roger Casement. Besides family portraits, the Casement collection includes documentation of his investigative work in the Congo and South America.
Events from April 1916 on are well documented in many different collections. The Keogh Brothers, for example, were commercial photographers in Lower Dorset Street from 1909. the bulk of their 232 glass negatives were made between 1914 and 1923, and cover the Easter Rising, the 1917 elections and the Civil War. J.W. O'Neill was an assistant engineer at the GPO. His 29 photographs record in great detail the interior and exterior of the building after the Rising. W.D. Hogan's photographs, in the Fitzelle Album, were taken in Limerick and Dublin during the Civil War, and include the funeral of Michael Collins. Bringing us bang up to date, Brian Hughes records life in Belfast over the last two decades.
As his images of Loyalist and Republican murals emphasise, the archive is still growing, gaining both historical and contemporary material. MacLochlainn is particularly excited by one recent addition, the Dennis Tynan collection from Glenties in Co Donegal. "He was taking very fine photographs of life in Donegal from the 1940s on, recording life in the town and, because of his involvement in fishing, out on the rivers." This fleshing out of low-key, local history is, she says, central to the Archive's rationale. And the real value of Rouse's work is that it does exactly as the title suggests, bringing this wealth of hidden material into the light.
The exhibition, Into the Light, can be seen at the National Photographic Archive, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar. Into the Light: An Illustrated Guide To The Photograph Collections In The National Library of Ireland, by Sarah Rouse, is published by the National Library of Ireland.
