Madam, - I can make a small addition to the detective work by Pat Cooke (April 5th) and Sunniva O'Flynn (April 8th) on the photograph in your supplement on the 1916 Rising purporting to show actual street fighting. The photograph was taken in 1964 by Erich Hartmann (1922-1999) a member of Magnum Photos in New York who had been engaged as stills photographer for the film Young Cassidy.
Although the film received "mixed reviews", it did at least bear fruit in another medium: alongside his work on the film set, Hartmann used his time in Dublin to make a darkly atmospheric portrait of the city, which received its world première in the Gallery of Photography in 2004. In this exhibition, called simply Dublin 1964, Hartmann was looking to evoke, not the fighting in the streets of 1916, but the fictional perambulations of Leopold Bloom through those same streets in 1904. Past and present, like fiction and reality, continue to interweave. - Yours, etc,
TANYA KIANG, Director, The Gallery of Photography, Dublin 2.
Madam, - Congratulations on the excellent 1916 supplement to your edition of March 28th. In order that Easter Week commemorations be more inclusive, might I make a simple suggestion: that a descendant or two of the plain people of Dublin who were disgusted by the carry-on of the insurgents in the GPO and elsewhere be invited on to the reviewing platform, together with representatives of the looters and those ordinary civilians whom the rebels fired on throughout the week?
Just to keep a bit of balance, really. - Yours, etc,
ARTHUR DUNNE, Blackrock, Co Dublin.