A ROUTINE piece of back work for the San Francisco Gael last year proved more than fortuitous for Dubliner Gerry Mullins. While researching an article in the Oakland Museum on the eminent American photographer, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), he unearthed a relative treasure trove of previously unpublished Irish material.
Credited as one of the pioneers of photo journalism, Lange won international accolades for her harrowing pictures of victims of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Among her admirers was John Steinbeck who drew heavily on her images when writing The Grapes of Wrath. In September 1954, inspired by Conrad Arsensberg's The Irish Countryman, an anthropological study set in the close knit community of Luogh in Co. Clare, she travelled to Ireland on a commission for LUG magazine. She was accompanied on the trip, her first outside the US by her son, Daniel Dixon.
Basing themselves in Ennis, they spent the next month travelling the length and breadth of Clare, meticulously documenting the topography of its people. Lange was 59 at the time and the small country boreens imposed great demands on her polio crippled body.
"A fine Irish mist has descended over my memory, says Dixon who is now 71 and living in California. "But my most memorable moment was a day out in the countryside with my mother when she was photographing a figure who suddenly appeared out of the landscape. As that figure became a recognisable human being I remember my mother saying. Look at that man, he's a lump of the Irish soil. She continued to take photographs so that they formed a sequence. Then he became a face and he just passed by, scarcely acknowledging us. Not a word was exchanged. To my mother the people were a part of the landscape the wind and the rain and the black Irish soil beneath the green grasses.
She found the Irish to be spiritually resilient and to have a sense of community, which was in stark contrast with the disintegration of American society and with the process of pauperisation which she had recorded 20 years previously.
There arc clear connections between the kind of work she did in rural America and Ireland," says Dixon. "The instincts and the sympathies were very much the same. She was working with people who were being wrenched up from their roots and forced to emigrate just as they were blown off their farms in Arkansas and Oklahoma and moved to California, which was like going to a different country.
A wry detached observer Lange looked upon herself as a servant rather than the source of her material. Aer photographs recorded market scenes, hurling matches, schoolchildren, daily chores, travelling musicians, the saving of the hay, the process of thatching, boys' comics, families on their way to mass and much more. Through her love of the quotidian and the commonplace and her unfailing eye for small quirky details she produced a sprawling and evocative collection of rural vignettes that penetrated the very essence of the Ireland of the 1950s.
HER publishers at Life did not see it that way, however, and only 19 of her 2,400 images were published by them. The collection then lay dormant and neglected at the Oakland Museum of California until Gerry Mullins's exhumation of them for Dorothea Lange's had which was published earlier this month, and is now on the best seller list. A graduate of UCD, with a Master's degree in Rural Development, Mullins has added a scholarly and illuminating text to complement the pictures.
While compiling the book, he visited many of the places where Lange had taken her pictures and found that very little had changed in the interim. Indeed, most of her subjects were still alive.
Bridie O'Halloran, for example, who was aged 10 when photographed, is now married with children and living in Kilmibil. She received money, presents and marriage proposals on the publication of her picture in Lee. Another subject, Michael "Patsy" Flanagan, a bachelor who still living on the same farm, near Lahinch, that Lange visited, denies that it was him, insisting that he was much better looking.
"I think they're wonderful photographs and a wonderful record of that time," says Colonel Robert Tottenham, a local landlord, who was 29 when Lange photographed him. He still lives on his family estate at Mount Callan. One of the little boys pictured on a hay float now works on the estate while his father, also in the photo, was a farm hand of the Tottenhams at the time. "She'd pursue a photograph for nearly half a day," remembers Dennis Wylde who was a young photographer based in Ennis at the time and who was called upon to assist with the driving duties on the days that Dixon had over indulged with the Bona Fides". "She'd knock up about 12 rolls of 12 in a day just looking for a picture. She'd go up in a mountain and eat a boiled egg and brown bread and stay there all day until she got what she wanted. The only thing that got her down was the way the light changed in Ireland because she was used to constant light," he recalls.
"This book shows that my mother's work was in transition at the time," says Dixon.
"She began in Ireland to photograph not just single images but also sequences which formed one image. She then combined photographs to form one statement."
