World’s first permanent photographic image created by Joseph Nicephore Niépce

Born to a prominent family in the Burgundy region of France, Joseph Nicephore Niépce (1764 – 1833) was motivated by the growing popular demand for affordable pictures. From the 1800s, he explored lithography – a printing method in which images drawn on stone can be reproduced using oil-based ink. Searching for other ways to produce images, he produced legible but fleeting camera pictures—or points de vue, as he called them—in 1816. Over the next decade he tried an array of chemicals, materials, and techniques to advance the process he ultimately called héliographie, or ‘sun writing’. The earliest surviving example of his work shows the view outside his studio window in eastern France. The scene was cast on a treated pewter plate that, after many hours, retained a crude copy of the buildings and rooftops outside. The result was the first known permanent photograph.

Niépce’s achievement laid the groundwork for the development of photography. Later, he worked with Louis Daguerre, whose sharper daguerreotype images marked photography’s next major advancement.

Explore this image further here

Image: Untitled ‘point de vue,’ 1827. Heliograph on pewter, 16.7 x 20.3 x .15 cm. taken at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes (Le Gras), France.

Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas

Daguerre made the first photograph that includes people

Boulevard du Temple, eight o’clock in the morning.

Louis Daguerre announced his invention of the first viable photographic process

On January 7, 1839, members of the French Académie des Sciences were shown products of an invention that would forever change the nature of visual representation: photography. The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), a Romantic painter and printmaker most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects. Each daguerreotype (as Daguerre dubbed his invention) was a one-of-a-kind image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper.

By 1838 Daguerre’s continued experiments had progressed to the point where he felt comfortable showing examples of the new medium to selected artists and scientists in the hope of lining up investors. François Arago, a noted astronomer and member of the French legislature, was among the new art’s most enthusiastic admirers. He became Daguerre’s champion in both the Académie des Sciences and the Chambre des Députés, securing the inventor a lifetime pension in exchange for the rights to his process. Only on August 19, 1839, was the revolutionary process explained, step by step, before a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, with an eager crowd of spectators spilling over into the courtyard outside.

The process revealed on that day seemed magical. Each daguerreotype is a remarkably detailed, one-of-a-kind photographic image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper, sensitized with iodine vapors, exposed in a large box camera, developed in mercury fumes, and stabilized (or fixed) with salt water or “hypo” (sodium thiosulfate). Although Daguerre was required to reveal, demonstrate, and publish detailed instructions for the process, he wisely retained the patent on the equipment necessary to practice the new art.

From the moment of its birth, photography had a dual character—as a medium of artistic expression and as a powerful scientific tool—and Daguerre promoted his invention on both fronts. Several of his earliest plates were still-life compositions of plaster casts after antique sculpture—an ideal subject since the white casts reflected light well, were immobile during long exposures, and lent, by association, the aura of “art” to pictures made by mechanical means. But he also photographed an arrangement of shells and fossils with the same deliberation, and used the medium for other scientific purposes as well. The journalist Hippolyte Gaucheraud, in a scoop that appeared the day before daguerreotypes were first shown to the Académie des Sciences, wrote of having been shown the image of a dead spider photographed through a solar microscope: “You could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature; [there is] not a filament, not a duct, as tenuous as might be, that you cannot follow and examine.” Even Arago, director of the Observatoire de Paris, was reportedly surprised by a daguerreian image of the moon.

Neither Daguerre’s microscopic nor his telescopic daguerreotypes survive, for on March 8, 1839, the Diorama—and with it Daguerre’s laboratory—burned to the ground, destroying the inventor’s written records and the bulk of his early experimental works. In fact, fewer than twenty-five securely attributed photographs by Daguerre survive—a mere handful of still lifes, Parisian views, and portraits from the dawn of photography.
– Malcolm Daniel

Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm

Fox Talbot announced the first positive/negative process within weeks of Daguerre.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 – 1877) was an English MP, scientist, inventor and amateur artist now best remembered as the father of the negative-positive process that is the basis of modern analogue photography. While on honeymoon in Italy in 1833 he was dissatisfied with his ability to sketch the landscapes. On his return, he experimented with ways to capture and retain the images cast in a camera obscura. On hearing the unexpected news of the invention of the daguerreotype, Talbot scrambled to make a public claim and within weeks had presented details to the Royal Society in London showing several paper photographs he had made in 1835.

At the time of Talbot’s announcement, his ‘art of photogenic drawing’ was better suited for recording the shadows of plant specimens or inanimate objects by direct contact – now known as photograms – than for camera images of people or scenes.

The Calotype process

This process uses a paper negative to make a print with a softer, less sharp image than the daguerreotype, but because a negative is produced, it is possible to make multiple copies. In this technique, a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride was exposed to light in a camera obscura; those areas hit by light became dark in tone, yielding a negative image.

The revolutionary aspect of the process lay in Talbot’s discovery of a chemical (gallic acid) that could be used to ‘develop’ the image on the paper—i.e., accelerate the silver chloride chemical reaction to the light it had been exposed to. The developing process permitted much shorter exposure times in the camera, down from one hour to one minute.

Patents
Talbot patented his process in 1841, which meant it was never taken up widely in the commercial sphere where the Daguerreotype was the preferred method. Instead, the calotype was adopted by amateurs, artists and scientists. This patent, and challenges to its perceived infringement by Frederick Scott Archer’s wet collodion process, have, perhaps unjustly, tarnished Talbot’s reputation. Lord Rosse, then President of the Royal Society, was to the fore in persuading him to relinquish the patent. In any case, the process was superseded in the mid 1850s by the wet collodion process.

Photo-engraving
Talbot’s achievements in photo-engraving have tended to be neglected, but they are of enormous significance in the development of mass circulation photography.
In 1852 he patented his ‘photographic engraving’ process, which produced an intaglio plate that could be printed by conventional methods—the final rendering of the photographic image was in stable printer’s ink. By 1858 he had evolved a much improved process which he called ‘photoglyphic engraving’ and a second patent was granted. These were direct ancestors of the modern photogravure process, and while they did not succeed commercially within his lifetime, Talbot was on absolutely the right track in this pursuit. He continued to perfect these processes until the end of his life, finally spending more time on photomechanical printing than he ever had on photography. The 1862 International Exhibition in London awarded him a prize medal for photoglyphic engraving.

Talbot was in direct communication with many of the leading Irish photographic pioneers including Lord Rosse and Mary Parsons, Countess of Rosse, William Holland Furlong, the King Tenisons and Francis Stewart Beatty.

Oldest surviving photo made by a woman

Known as the ‘Quillan Leaf’ this photogram is now understood to have been created by the English artist Sarah Anne Bright (1793–1866), and not Henry Fox Talbot, or indeed Thomas Wedgewood, as had been thought.

The detective work that went into the attribution is explored here

Richard Beard opened Britain’s first commercial photographic portrait studio

Less than two years after the introduction of the daguerreotype process in France, Richard Beard (1801 – 1885), a coal merchant and entrepreneur, had purchased the licence to use the daguerreotype process and opened his first photographic studio. It was set up in London’s Royal Polytechnic Institution on Regent Street, in a glasshouse on the roof, in order to provide maximum all-round lighting required for adequate daguerreotype exposures.
Beard was the owner of this and other studios, but was not himself the photographer. Among the ‘operators’ to work at his studios was the Belfast engraver Francis Stewart Beatty who worked there for less than a year from October 1841.
There were huge profits from Beard’s studios in London and Liverpool and from the sale of licences to take daguerreotypes, but Beard was ruined by his many legal actions against rivals, and went bankrupt in 1850.

The cartoon of Beard’s Polytechnic Studio is by George Cruikshank, published in George Cruikshank’s Omnibus (London: Tilt and Bogue, 1842)

Michael Pakenham Edgeworth photographs of Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford

Michael Pakenham Edgeworth (Irish, 1812 – 1881) the younger half brother of the novelist Maria, made some of the earliest extant photographs in Ireland around 1843.

He studied oriental languages and botany at University in Edinburgh before beginning his career with the East India Company in 1831. His interest in botany led to his experimental work in early photography, with his journals from 1840 detailing his efforts to control the Calotype process in illustrating specimens.

He travelled back from India to the UK on furlough in 1842. Continuing with his photographic work in Ireland, he produced a number of calotype negatives of his home, Edgeworthstown House.

It is known that Pakenham-Edgeworth visited the Brewsters in St Andrews in November 1843, and it is believed that the positives of his Longford images were produced there, which would date the images to early or mid-1843 – very soon after Henry Craigie Brewster’s Cork Calotypes were made.

The prints are preserved in the Brewster Album, compiled by Sir David Brewster, now held at the Paul J. Getty Museum. This album also holds the prints of Henry Craigie Brewster, Sir David’s son.

Images courtesy Paul J Getty Museum

Daguerreotype portrait of the philanthropist Vere Foster by Beard

Vere Foster was born in Copenhagen of an Irish-born father and worked in the British Diplomatic Corps. Foster visited his family estate in County Louth, Ireland during the height of the Great Famine in 1847. When his father died in 1848, Vere Foster underwent a crisis in his life, and he dedicated himself to philanthropic work in Ireland.

With his own capital, in 1852 he established the Irish Female Emigration Fund dedicated to supporting emigrants on the condition that they sent financial support back to their families. Foster made three voyages to the U.S. as a steerage passenger on emigrant ships. Appalled by the exploitative treatment of emigrants he lobbied successfully for an improvement in conditions. Following unfounded reports that he was selling girls into prostitution or corrupting their faith he located emigrants of whom this was alleged, arranged to have their daguerreotype portraits taken, and their personal story written down. On one occasion in Ardee, Co. Louth, it is said that he silently displayed their photographs and recent history, with letters of confirmation. In 1858 he considered it best to shut down the fund.

Vere Foster helped to found and became the first President of the Irish National Teachers Organisation. He was responsible for the construction or upgrading of around 2000 national schools throughout the country. He devised cheap, popular but effective school books, donating the proceeds towards the cost of the construction of the Royal Victoria hospital in Belfast. Vere Foster died penniless in Belfast in 1900.

Image courtesy NLI Duggan Collection

Is this Ireland’s first selfie?

Self-portrait of Henry Craigie Brewster (1816 – 1905)

Henry Craigie Brewster was the youngest son of Sir David Brewster, the Scottish scientist, polymath, inventor of the kaleidoscope, and friend and regular correspondent of Henry Fox Talbot. Henry Craigie was therefore part of the lively photographic circle associated with his father and St Andrews University, which was one of the main centres for activity and experimentation in the calotype process.

Henry Craigie Brewster was a Captain with the 76th Regiment of Foot, which was stationed in Ireland in the early 1840s. While on leave in St Andrews he obtained a camera from the Edinburgh optician Thomas Davidson in order to photograph his regiment while assigned to Cork in Ireland.

His salt prints from calotype negatives – extremely faded – are the oldest extant photographs made in Ireland. They were taken between winter 1842 and May 1843, when the regiment transferred out of Cork.

The self-portrait, extremely faded, shows the photographer with his eyes closed. This was often the practise in the very early years of calotype portraiture on account of the long exposures required.

Brewster was later posted to Plymouth, Corfu and Cephalonia, from where he sent home pen and ink sketches rather than further photographic works. This would further support the contention that this self-portrait is indeed Ireland’s earliest surviving selfie.

The Brewster Album
These and other calotypes were collated into an album by Sir David Brewster and his wife Julia. Now known as ‘the Brewster Album’, this thick, leather-bound volume contains almost two hundred photographs ranging in date from 1839 to the 1850s, with the majority from the 1840s. There is an extensive series of photographs taken by Henry Fox Talbot, and Dr John Adamson, as well as smaller groups of photographs and single images by a wide variety of early practitioners including Sir John Herschel, Henry Collen, Michael Pakenham Edgeworth, and Brewster’s son, Henry Craigie Brewster. It would appear that the images were gifts from their makers. Some have hand-written annotations by Sir David as to who the photographer was and what or who is depicted. The complete Album is now in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Image courtesy J. Paul Getty Museum

The earliest extant photographic portraits made in Ireland – Captain Henry Craigie Brewster’s portraits of fellow officers of the 76th Regiment

Salt paper print from calotype negative by Captain Henry Craigie Brewster

From the Brewster Album, image courtesy Paul J. Getty Museum

Captain Henry Craigie Brewster’s calotypes from Cork, Fermoy and Buttevant barracks

Salt paper print from a calotype negative by Captain Henry Craigie Brewster

From the Brewster Album, image courtesy Paul J. Getty Museum

Daguerreotype portrait of Michael Pakenham Edgeworth, younger brother of Maria Edgeworth

Michael Pakenham Edgeworth (Irish, 1812 – 1881) is the younger half brother of the novelist Maria. He made some of the earliest extant photographs in Ireland around 1843.

Photographer unknown. As Michael himself experimented with photography, it is possible that this is a self-portrait.

Image courtesy NGI

Only surviving photographic image of Daniel O’Connell

This image forms part of a set of daguerreotypes of O’Connell and the so-called ‘Repeal Martyrs’, including Thomas Matthew Ray, secretary of the Repeal Association, and Charles Gavan Duffy, one of the founders of The Nation and a member of O’Connell’s Repeal Association. These striking likenesses were taken while the men were incarcerated in rooms in the Richmond Bridewell prison in Dublin in 1844.
In his memoir, Young Ireland: a fragment of Irish history 1840-45, Charles Gavan Duffy wrote: ‘An artist’s studio and a daguerreotypist’s camera were set up within the precincts to multiply likenesses of the prisoners, and the caricaturists made more amusing ones without the trouble of a sitting.’
It was a commercial photographer called Alexander Doussin Dubreuil (Irish, fl. 1842-1845) who had been granted access to the prison to take the daguerreotypes. He operated from a studio on the roof of the Rotunda buildings, at the top of Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), and created these rare photographic images just five years after the new daguerreotype process was announced to the world.
These extremely rare photographic images, each measuring approximately 5.5 x 4cm, with the sitters’ signatures inscribed underneath, are mounted and set into a gilt frame. They are now in the National Gallery of Ireland’s collection. They were purchased for £15 in 1905 from the daughter of Thomas Ray, one of the depicted men.

Source: NGI

Lithograph of Daniel O’Connell, based on a daguerreotype

As the daguerreotype process creates only one unique image, it was not easy to make multiple copies. One could take a daguerreotype of the original but this was expensive and not easy to produce in large quantities. For this, lithography or engraving was used, as in this portrait of Daniel O’Connell engraved by Johann Stadler and printed in Vienna.

Image: NGI.10982

Irish Poet Thomas Moore, photographed by his neighbour Henry Fox Talbot with members of the Talbot family at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire.

Irish poet Thomas Moore, photographed by his neighbour Fox Talbot at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire. The distinctive curls identify Talbot’s half sister Henrietta Horatia Fielding standing to his left. Eliza Frayland, the nursemaid at the far left, had come into the family’s employ with the birth of Charles Henry Talbot in 1842. Arranged in the front are Matilda Caroline (later Gilchrist-Clark, age 5); Ela Theresa (age 9); Rosamond Constance Talbot (age 7). The woman at the right is possibly Moore’s wife Bessy.

Moore took an early interest in Talbot’s photogenic drawings. Talbot, in turn, took images of Moore’s hand-written poetry possibly for inclusion in facsimile in an edition of The Pencil of Nature.

Henry Fox Talbot set up the first photographic printing firm

The widespread distribution of large editions of photographic prints was the promise of Talbot’s negative-positive process and its principal advantage over the contemporaneous French daguerreotype. In early 1844, in an effort to encourage the mass production of paper photographs, Talbot supported Nicolaas Henneman, his former valet, in the creation of the first photographic printing firm, situated in the town of Reading. It was there that prints for ‘The Pencil of Nature’ were produced.

The activities of the Reading establishment are shown in this image: Talbot, operating the camera at the center, makes a portrait, while at the right Henneman photographs a sculpture of the Three Graces. Other employees copy an engraving, stand attentively with a second camera back-loaded with sensitized paper, attend the racks of glass frames in which negatives and photographic paper are sandwiched for printing in sunlight, and adjust a device likely intended to aid focusing.

Image courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Frederick Scott Archer publicises the ‘Wet Collodion’ process

Frederick Scott Archer’s Wet Plate Collodion process was the first practical photographic process to be both sharp and easily reproducible. It combined the clarity and detail of Daguerre’s unique images on silvered metal plates, with the practical convenience and reproducibility of Fox Talbot’s positive-negative calotype prints on paper. It also enabled photographers to significantly reduce exposure times.

Scott Archer was an English sculptor and trained calotypist who was dissatisfied with how the texture and impurities in the paper negatives affected the prints. In 1848 he found that a preparation of collodion (a recently discovered sticky, viscous liquid that clings to glass) made it possible to use clear glass instead of waxed or oiled paper as the support for the camera negative. Crisp, sharp negatives could finally be made, from which any number of detailed prints on paper could be struck.

The preparation of the collodion, ‘the pour’ onto plates and the processing of the plates after exposure in the camera needed to be carried out on the spot.

The collodion process soon replaced the calotype in commercial use, and by the end of the decade, the daguerreotype was virtually extinct as well. From about 1855 until the early 1880s, the wet plate collodion process was the dominant form of photography.

A gift to the world
Scott Archer published his invention in The Chemist in March 1851, and in 1852 he published A Manual of the Collodion Photographic Process. In publishing his discovery, he did so knowingly without first patenting it, giving it as a gift to the world.

In 1856, the Liverpool Photographic Journal commented: “Mr Archer’s disinterestedness cannot be too highly or substantially complimented… the discovery might have been worth a fortune… In every direction indeed in which we turn, we perceive alike its value and the generosity which bestowed it—free as air, for the public good”.

Scott Archer made other contributions to the development of photography, including a neatly folding collodion camera in 1853. This was in fact a camera, a miniature darkroom and a storage box for chemistry all in one. The camera had two black velvet sleeves through which the photographer could put their hands to sensitise, develop and fix the glass plate inside. An amber window allowed the photographer to see what they were doing. Trays and bottles of chemicals were stored inside the camera. When folded for carrying, the camera was very compact – about the size of a couple of shoeboxes.

Scott Archer took up photography professionally, opening a studio in Great Russell Street, near the British Museum; but he made no money. Plagued by poor health, he died impoverished in 1857 aged 44 leaving a wife and three children penniless. His family were awarded a government pension of £50 per annum ‘in consideration of the scientific discoveries of their father’ and members of the Photographic Society contributed £767 in recognition that he was: “… the true architect of all those princely fortunes which are being acquired by the use of his ideas and inventions”.

Image: Portrait of Frederick Scott Archer by Robert Cade, c.1855, courtesy National Media Museum
Excellent article on Frederick Scott Archer’s life and work – includes some of his own photographs, on the Science Museum’s blog here.
Watch a video made for J Paul Getty Foundation which describes the technique very clearly : The Wet Collodion Process

The Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were active patrons of photography. Their patronage of the Great Exhibition in 1851 gave millions of visitors their first opportunity to see a photograph, some of which had been lent by the royal couple themselves. The exposition was a great success. Over the five months it was open to the public, it attracted more than six million visitors – approximately one third of the population of Britain at the time. It made a profit of some £186,000 – equivalent to tens of millions today.

The Crystal Palace was designed by Joseph Paxton – a young man without any architectural training – and built in record time. It established an architectural standard for later international exhibitions, such as that held in Dublin two years later. As befits a photo of the largest glass building in the world, this daguerreotype by John Jabez Edwin Mayall was at the time one of the largest daguerreotypes ever made. Note the shadowy figure in the foreground who moved during the exposure. The image shows a full-size elm tree in front of a Refreshment room run by Schweppes, and a fountain made of crystal glass, with water perfumed with cologne.

Image courtesy J. Paul Getty Museum

John Shaw Smith, ‘St Doulough’s Church, near Coolock, Dublin’

One of the rare images made by John Shaw Smith in Ireland shows his interest and skill in architectural photography.
St. Doulough’s Church is one of Ireland’s architectural enigmas. According to Peter Harbison, it “presents more puzzles per square foot than any other building of comparable size in Ireland” {Studies, Spring 1982}

Ireland is home to the Grubbs, one of the world’s leading optical instrument makers

Thomas Grubb , 1800-1878, and his son Sir Howard Grubb, 1844-1931, were Irish engineers who manufactured many optical and metal devices, particularly in the field of astronomical instruments. Thomas was a keen photographer and a founder of the Dublin Photographic Society in 1854.

In 1858 Thomas obtained a patent for a new lens design called an Aplanatic which was designed largely for landscape work. It was sold in Ireland and other countries, often through agents. The lenses were of superb quality and were used for significant work in the 1860s by the likes of Carleton Watkins in Yosemite USA and Samuel Bourne in the Himalayas.

After the late 1860s the Grubbs turned towards astronomical instruments, but the firm was still producing some camera lenses in a variety of designs, as late as the 1880s.

John Gough and Mary Gough, outside their shop on Eustace Street, Dublin

The image is certainly taken after 1865 as the goods on sale include stereoscopic views and photographs of some of the works of art at the Dublin International Exhibition of that year.

A wonderful image from the Collection of the Society of Friends.

The Dillons of Clonbrock were so keen on photography that they had a studio and darkroom constructed on the grounds, known as the “Photo House”.

Luke Gerald Dillon, 4th Baron Clonbrock (1834 – 1917), and his family in front of the ‘Photo House’ in Clonbrock, County Galway, Ireland.

Dillon was an Irish peer. In 1865, he was appointed High Sheriff of County Galway. He married Augusta Caroline Crofton, daughter of Edward Crofton, 2nd Baron Crofton of Mote and Lady Georgina Paget, in 1866 in Roscommon. The couple, particularly Augusta, were enthusiastic amateur photographers. They recorded activities on and near their estate throughout the second half of the 19th century. The Dillons were so keen on the medium that they had a studio and darkroom constructed on the grounds, which was referred to as the “Photo House”.

The Clonbrock Collection contains over 2,000 glass plates and is housed in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin.

Image: NLI CLON46

Thomas J. Wynne advertising his Photography Studio and Shop, Main Street, Castlebar, Co. Mayo

Thomas Joseph Wynne (1838-1893) was an American-Irish photographer and shopkeeper. In 1867 he established a successful photographic studio in his shop on Market St. Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
As this fascinating self-promotional image attests, Wynne was involved in photography at all levels – taking portraits and commissions, copying manuscripts, as well as selling fine art reproductions etc. He photographed scenes of urban and rural life, featuring agricultural shows, sporting events, political meetings, evictions, and pilgrims at Knock and Croagh Patrick. His images of protests during the Land War are early examples of reportage. In addition to his studio portrait work, he undertook commissions throughout Connemara. He is best known for his portraits of public figures including Capt. Charles Boycott, the 3rd earl of Lucan and Archbishop John MacHale.

The object pictured at the bottom of this photo is a stereoscopic viewer – a popular device which was all the rage in the ‘better’ parlours during the latter half of the 19th century.

Image courtesy NLI WYN1

Edweard Muybridge pioneer of high-speed photography

Animal Locomotion : Eadweard Muybridge uses a row of cameras with trip-wires to make a high-speed photographic analysis

Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was one of the most influential photographers of his time, and is best known for photographing horses in motion – proving for the first time through high-speed photography that all four hooves leave the ground in mid-gallop. He advanced film-processing chemicals and in 1879 invented the zoopraxiscope, the precursor to cinema.

Originally from England, he began his photography career in 1867 in San Francisco, at a time of rapid advances in transport and communication. Following the publication of Animal Locomotion, he lectured widely in Europe during 1889-91 and visited Dublin and Belfast at the invitation of the Photographic Society of Ireland and Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society. According to the Daily Express, “The Royal Dublin Society’s Theatre was filled to its utmost capacity yesterday afternoon, when Mr Muybridge resumed his course of lectures. The demonstration is simply marvellous.” The Irish Times reported that “the lecture and admirable illustrations were loudly applauded.”

His influence can still be felt today, from studies in anatomical motion to animation, cinema and painting.

Above: Animated gif from frame 1 to 11 of Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion. It shows the horse ‘Sallie Gardner’, owned by Leland Stanford, running at the Palo Alto track, 19 June 1878.
Animation courtesy Nevit Dilman, [Wikimedia Commons]

Anti-eviction protestors at Bodyke, County Clare

Anti-eviction protesters with an effigy of Colonel O’Callaghan, the principal landowner at Bodyke, in Co. Clare. O’Callaghan had refused to lower rents even though his tenants were in distress. In June 1887 O’Callaghan called for police assistance in evicting the tenants, who resisted by force, witnessed by large crowds.

An early instance of photo-reportage, this image is attributed to Henry Norman journalist for the Pall Mall Gazette. It was taken on Friday, June 3rd 1887, the day after Widow MacNamara’s eviction. The sign nailed to the effigy reads: “Praise the Lord for here the Tyrant’s arm was paralysed”. This refers to an episode some days earlier, when a sheriff, called McMahon, had turned up with a large force to effect the eviction, but had an epileptic fit and the police withdrew. The tenants saw this as divine intervention and made this effigy.

The priest visible on the right is likely to be Fr. Murphy, who also appears in the related photo showing the widow, Margaret MacNamara’s cottage.

Image: NLI EB_2665

Quinn family, Waterford celebrating the Eucharistic Congress, 1932

Although the major gatherings for the Eucharistic Congress took place in the capital, communities around the country also found inventive ways to celebrate.

Image: NLI POOLEWP3922

Macroom Photographic Services opens in the back of Dinneen’s bar.

Dineen’s Bar, Macroom, Co. Cork
For three decades, Dennis Dinneen provided photos for passports and driving licences, took individual and family portraits, and captured images of the bar’s patrons. Developing his skills as a photographer outside the studio, he also photographed weddings, religious ceremonies, theatre productions, sporting events, and a variety of other local occasions. Over his career as a photographer, Dennis exposed an estimated 50,000 negatives, of which around 30,000 were destroyed, along with prints and equipment, when a fire ripped through the bar in 1981. The remnants of the studio’s darkroom are present to this day, though barely recognisable, in the upstairs loft at the back.
More than just a photographer, Dennis was a publican and local taximan; he would be your wedding photographer and the chauffeur that drove you from your home to the church. He was the unassuming, subtle life and soul of every party he went to. He was a talented singer and storyteller, with many stories to tell and many songs to sing, whose resounding voice captivated his listeners. Dennis passed away in 1985, leaving the bar to his sons, Lawrence and Dennis. Along with their families, they still run the bar on Main Street in Macroom, where it continues to serve as a focal point for the local community.
– Ciara Dinneen

Elinor Wiltshire made her acclaimed series of portraits of Travellers in Cork

President Kennedy takes tea at the Kennedy ancestral farm in Dunganstown, Co. Wexford.

Image courtesy: JFK Presidential Library & Museum, Boston

Fergus Bourke, acclaimed documentary photographer begins working in Dublin

Fergus Bourke (1934-2004) has long been regarded as one of Ireland’s foremost and finest photographers. His body of work spans a variety of genres from an extensive career. He was renowned as a photographer of Dublin street scenes in the 1960s, depicting the now vanished world of tenements and children’s games, each one quietly observed and captured with warmth, compassion and humour. His pioneering photojournalism documented the depths of Irish poverty in the 1970s. A remarkable portraitist, his Kindred series captured prominent Irish figures throughout the 1980s, work that was complemented by his extensive documentation of all major productions in the Abbey Theatre between 1970 and 1995.

In 1980 Bourke was admitted as an artist to Aosdána, an association of people in Ireland who have achieved distinction in the arts; he was the first photographer to be so acknowledged. He held a major retrospective at the Gallery of Photography in 2003 during which the film maker Art O’Briain shot a moving documentary about his work, Fergus Bourke – In His Own Words. Bourke was diagnosed with a terminal illness and passed away before the film was premiered.

Evelyn Hofer made her series which was published in ‘Dublin: A Portrait’ with an essay by V.S. Pritchett

German-American artist Evelyn Hofer (1922-2009) is one of the foremost female photographers in recent history, and her works still captivate us today with their intensity and clarity of form. Over five decades she pursued her métier as a kind of artistic sociological research, and covered a wide spectrum of subjects and genres, from city views and portraits of artists to architecture, interiors, landscapes and still lives.

Her work is also inextricably bound up with the books she illustrated in the late 1950s and 1960s for acclaimed authors such as Mary McCarthy and V.S. Pritchett. The latter’s in-depth essay is featured in Dublin: A Portrait, which enjoyed great popularity when first published in 1967. This work was shown for the first time in Ireland in “Dublin & Other Portraits” at the Gallery of Photography in 2012, to huge popular and critical acclaim.

Image: Girl on a Bicycle, The Liberties, Dublin, 1966.

Earthrise taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders while in orbit around the Moon, Dec 24, 1968

By NASA/Bill Anders

Bloody Sunday – January 30, 1972

Iconic moments in history: Stanley Matchett captures an image of Bishop Edward Daly carrying a blood-stained handkerchief ahead of the body of Jack Duddy, who was shot dead in Derry on Bloody Sunday.

The stories behind this and other images from the period are explored in Tom Burke’s acclaimed documentary ‘Shooting the Darkness’. A book of the same name has also been published by Blackstaff Press (2019).

Image © Stanley Matchett

Real Ireland Design postcard company is established

Belfast Exposed, Northern Ireland’s dedicated photography gallery is established.

Founded in 1983 by Danny Burke and a group of local photographers as a challenge to media representation of Belfast’s experience of conflict, Belfast Exposed is Northern Ireland’s dedicated photography gallery. Located in the city’s ‘Cathedral Quarter’ since 2003, it continues to reflect a socially engaged ethos, while responding to contemporary currents in photography and politics further afield.

Martin Parr publishes ‘A Fair Day’ book featuring work made in Ireland

Young family, Dublin, July 1985, by Steve Pyke

Can you help identify the young family in this photograph, taken in Dublin by photographer Steve Pyke in 1985?

Tony O’Shea’s Dubliners book is published – solo exhibition at Gallery of Photography on Wellington Quay

A legendary figure in the context of Irish documentary photography, O’Shea’s book Dubliners occupies a pivotal role in the history of Irish photography and defines the territory that O’Shea made so inimitably his own – the everyday life of ordinary people, their joys and sorrows, their struggles and triumphs, the rituals that they use to make sense of their lives. Tony O’Shea was born in Valentia Island, County Kerry in 1947 and lived there for the first 20-years of his life. He studied English and Philosophy at University College Dublin and towards the end of the 1970s became increasingly interested in photography. By 1981 he had begun working full-time as a photographer with In Dublin magazine and once it ceased publication he went on to work for Sunday Business Post for many years. His first book Dubliners, including a text by Colm Tóibín was published by Macdonald Illustrated. He lives in Dublin with his wife Sarah, and their daughters Keelin and Siúin. His latest book The Light of the Day is published by RRB Books. Gallery of Photography Ireland is currently working with Tony on a retrospective of his work.

Anthony Haughey ‘Home’ series

For over a year Haughey lived and worked on the Ballymun housing estate in Dublin. His resulting award-winning social documentary project Home concentrated on the daily lives of several families and was one of the first major Irish documentary projects to utilise colour photography.

You can see more of the project on his site here.

Source publishes its first issue

Source is a major photographic journal based in Belfast. They published their first issue in 1992. The journal has a strong legacy of engaging with the most important debates in contemporary photography, through extensive portfolios, features and critically engaged reviews. It has long been supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in recognition of its pivotal contribution to evolving debates about the medium.

Krass Clement publishes ‘Drum – a place in Ireland’

Danish photographer Krass Clement’s Drum, was photographed in the eponymous village in County Monaghan. The series unfolds in the village pub, and was largely shot over a single evening with only three and a half rolls of film. It is now considered one of the most important contributions to the canon of contemporary photobooks. Revolving around one principal character – a hunched, weatherbeaten old man who sits alone with his drink, Drum comments on community, the outsider, alienation and the terrors of being alone. It was exhibited for the first time in Ireland in Gallery of Photography Ireland in 2017, with a special projection installation of the work in the original pub setting.

Major retrospective of Harry Thuillier Jr at the Gallery of Photography.

This posthumous retrospective of Irish photographer Harry Thuillier Jr featured a range of dark and shadowy work, showcasing in particular his mastery of the arcane platinum printing process. Thuillier died in tragic circumstances at the age of just 33.

David Farrell wins the European Publishers Award for his project ‘Innocent Landscapes’

On foot of this coveted Award, Farrell’s work was published in hardback editions by five European publishers, with French, German, Italian, Spanish and English-language texts as appropriate.

Image: Ballynultagh, 2000, from the series Innocent Landscapes.

You can see more from the project on his website.

Richard Torchia transformed the Gallery of Photography into a giant, walk-in camera

American artist and curator Richard Torchia’s installation ‘Architectural Optics’ turned the Gallery building into a giant, walk-in camera, where visitors could see a vast upside-down view of the scene outside. Deceptively simple, the work had a hypnotic, even hallucinatory quality. The work was made in collaboration with John Tuomey of O’Donnell & Tuomey, architects of the building.

John Duncan’s series ‘Trees from Germany’

John Duncan’s series Trees from Germany explores the rapid development of his native Belfast in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement. He shows how the city was transformed by an influx of investment capital much like the rapid economic growth of southern Ireland characterised as the Celtic Tiger. Duncan is one of the editors of the prestigious Source magazine.

Image: Cotton Court, Waring Street, Belfast, 2003

You can see the rest of the work on his site here.

Donovan Wylie published his acclaimed MAZE book and series

Between 2002 and 2003 Donovan Wylie spent almost a hundred days photographing inside the Maze prison. Through its history of protests, hunger strikes and escapes, this prison, holding both republican and loyalist prisoners, became synonymous with the Northern Ireland conflict. After the Belfast peace agreement in 1998, inmates were gradually released, but the Maze remained open. Wylie was then the only photographer granted official and unlimited access to the site, when the demolition of the prison began, symbolising the end of the conflict in 2007. This series documents the physical structure of the place and gives the viewer some experience of the psychological impact of being inside the Maze. Donovan had his first exhibition in Gallery of Photography Ireland when he was sixteen years old.

Anthony Haughey’s Disputed Territory awarded the international Leopold Godowsky Jr Photography Award.

Irish photographer Anthony Haughey’s long-term project Disputed Territory investigates the aftermath of recent conflict in Europe, including Kosovo, Bosnia and Ireland. The award-winning series culminated in 2006 with a major international touring exhibition and publication. Besides large-scale colour photographs, Disputed Territory includes a series of interventions using found photographs, and a sound/video installation piece, Resolution.

Image courtesy the artist.

Karl Grimes’s ‘Dignified Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk’ project

The National Museum and Gallery of Photography jointly presented Dignified Kings Play Chess on Fine Green Silk, a body of work by Irish photographer Karl Grimes based on his artist-in-residency at the Natural History Museum. In photographs, drawings, lightboxes, text and sound, it re-interprets the museum ‘Dead Zoo’ collections and Victorian museum practices in Ireland. It also highlighted the work of the pioneering scientist R.M. Barrington, whose 20-year study of the migratory patterns of birds was conducted with the assistance of Irish lighthouse keepers and is an early example of participatory, ‘citizen’ science.

Image courtesy the artist.

Eoin O’Conaill receives the Gallery of Photography’s Artist Award for his project ‘Common Place’

Eoin O’Conaill received the Gallery of Photography’s Artist Award for his project Common Place. The work formed the basis of his first major solo exhibition and is a subtle exploration of Ireland during the recent period of cultural and economic change. Its atmospheric images are of fractured landscapes of contemporary life on the hinterlands of Irish cities and towns. The photographs are mainly taken at transitional hours of the day, early morning or evening time, again exploring the liminal and the in-between.

Image courtesy the artist

Simon Burch’s project Under a Grey Sky

Made over four years, the work explores the rain-soaked peatlands of Ireland’s central plain, the most intensively industrialised landscape in the country. In large scale colour landscapes and portraits, Burch captures the distinctive textures of this unique area, revealing hidden surprises. With its palette of browns and muted greys, Burch’s work has a strong painterly quality. In large-scale prints, gouged and scarred landscapes meet monotone skies; expansive horizons convey a sense of freedom and possibility. The work presents a dichotomy between the desolation and emptiness of the peatland, and the latent energy it holds for the community. These are negative spaces providing a positive utility, albeit at the cost of their own destruction. Laced between the worked bogs are villages whose inhabitants are intrinsically linked to the land, either by past generations who have been locked in by economic needs, or others seeking to live where they feel free.

See more of the project on Simon Burch’s site.

Image courtesy the artist.

Noel Bowler’s series Making Space

Noel Bowler’s Making Space series looks at how the Islamic community in Ireland has adapted existing locations for the purposes of prayer and religious observance. Bowler’s contemplative pictures give a unique view of the intersections between faith and place in a rapidly changing Ireland.

See more of the project here.

Image courtesy the artist.

Sebastião Salgado exhibited his ‘Amazon’ series in Dublin

For his Amazon project, Sebastião Salgado travelled the Brazilian Amazon for six years and photographed the unparalleled beauty of this extraordinary region: its forests, rivers, mountains and peoples. In 2012, Gallery of Photography Ireland hosted the world premiere of this acclaimed body of work which was accompanied by a programme of education activities promoting conservation of the planet’s rainforests.

Premiere of ‘THE MARKET’ by Mark Curran

For this ambitious undertaking, Irish artist Mark Curran contacted stock and commodity exchanges around the globe, including the Irish Stock Exchange, London and Frankfurt’s financial centres and the recently established Ethiopian Commodity Exchange in Addis Ababa. Negotiating access took on average more than 18 months. The installation in Ireland’s Gallery of Photography combined photographs, film, artefacts, sound and verbal testimonies.

Image: Bethlehem, Trader (negotiation 1.5 years), Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from the series THE MARKET, September 2012. Courtesy the artist.

30 Years Northern Irish Photography by Colin Graham, published by Belfast Exposed and MAC, Belfast.

Dragana Jurišić publishes her book YU: The Lost Country

Born in the former Yugoslavia, Dragana Jurišić is an artist living and working in Ireland. Her project YU: The Lost Country retraces the journey of writer Rebecca West across Jurišić’s former homeland in the 1930s. This subtle work considers the experience of exile and how national histories intersect with individual lives. Jurišić’s personal reflections appear as a text alongside her photographs, at times in dialogue with West’s and at others describing the making of the work as coming to terms with her own past.

For more see her website.

Diane by Mandy O’Neill

Mandy O’Neill’s practice draws on themes of youth, adolescence, and education, with a particular emphasis on portraiture. In the last number of years she has undertaken extended artist residencies in both schools and institutions. Her work engages with the physical and psychological space of these environments, coupled with the interplay of people and place. It seeks to examine the wider structural, social and political contexts within which institutions operate and particularly those tasked with the support and development of children and young people.

Mandy was awarded the Zurich Portrait Prize in 2018 for her photograph of Diane. This was the first time the Prize had been awarded for a photograph.

Eamonn Doyle’s mid-career retrospective ‘Made in Dublin’ published by Phaidon

Building on the success of his own self-published projects, this lavish mid-career retrospective surveys Doyle’s innovative approach to street photography. The publication features powerful design from Doyle’s long-time collaborator Niall Sweeney.

Dara McGrath’s Centenary project ‘For Those That Tell No Tales’ premiered at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork

Dara McGrath’s For Those That Tell No Tales is a major body of work exploring place, memory and the War of Independence. Approximately 1,400 people died as a direct result of the conflict between 1919-21. Cork saw some of the bloodiest fighting: a total of 528 people lost their lives in the city and county, including civilians, British Forces, and Irish Volunteers (who in 1920 became known as the Irish Republican Army or Óglaigh Na hÉireann). McGrath’s project premiered at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork.

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Gallery of Photography Ireland becomes Photo Museum Ireland!

On 22 June Gallery of Photography marked an important step in its development, changing its name to Photo Museum Ireland. The new name better reflects the organisation’s role as Ireland’s national centre for contemporary photography, and will assist the organisation in realising its ultimate goal of relocating to a larger space on a par with international photo museums.

In Our Own Image: The Politics of Place – the exhibition is launched

The third chapter of the Museum’s year-long In Our Own Image exhibition programme, The Politics of Place is a landmark survey exhibition that undertakes a critical reframing of the way Irish life has been represented through photography. It addresses how photographers have engaged with the notion of place, one of the defining obsessions of our national life. 

Open between 25 June – 27 August 2022

The Light of Day – major retrospective exhibition by Tony O’Shea is launched

Curated and produced by Photo Museum Ireland, this retrospective exhibition brings together for the first time over one hundred images by Tony O’Shea. It includes his seminal bodies of work – The Hill, Dubliners, Bird Men, Turkey Markets, Drag Hunts, Border Roads, Ways of the Cross, Italia 90 and Never Forget – together with his more personal images of his late father.