The Photograph as a Site of Mnemonic Return
In September in 1954 Dorothea Lange began a six-week assignment for Life Magazine, shooting rural life in Clare, a county on the western seaboard of Ireland. Based for the duration of her stay at the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis, she hired a car and travelled out daily into local villages and town lands to document rural existence as she found it. Lange was fifty-nine years of age when she visited Ireland and it was her first trip outside of America. She travelled with her son Daniel Dixon, who was to write an accompanying photo essay for her images. Prior to visiting Ireland, Lang read The Irish Countryman, a book written in 1937 by the Harvard based academic and anthropologist Conrad Arensberg. Arensberg’s text was based on observations made during a year of field studies in the small village of Lough in North-West Clare.
Linda Gordon in her autobiography on Lange, A Life Beyond Limits,(2009, p370) notes that in Ireland Lange was searching for something of the rural unspoiled relationship between people, community and the land that marked her project on Mormon life in America. Gordon also comments that Lange’s preparation included defining symbolic, descriptive and analytic categories of topics to capture, with an identified list of particular subjects planned in advance. These included, ‘emigration; congregations; the temperament and the weather…the church, the creamers, the fair’, and technical specifications including angle of view on her subjects. A Typology of the recurring themes or motifs in Lange’ Irish work would include; people going to and coming from church, school, hurling matches and markets. She also found and concentrated on a number of family units, including the O’Halloran family whose two daughters were about to emigrate to America, and the farmstead of Michael Kenneally, who was over time to become the most iconic subject in this body of work.
During the six-week assignment, Lange shot some 2,400 images, but onlynineteenof these made the final edit, half of what was initially planned. According to Mullins (1998), Dixon’s original text was also replaced by that of an in house writer andLange was so unhappy with the final article, she never worked for Life magazine again.Her images from Ireland remained largely unknown, buried in the archives of the Oakland Museum until the early 1990’s when Gerry Mullins, an Irish freelance journalist living in San Francisco discovered the work by chance while searching for an Irish interest item for the Gael newspaper. His subsequent book Dorothea Lange’s Ireland, is the first and only comprehensive overview of these images to date, and includes ninety eight full plate images, with accompanying articles by both Mullins and Daniel Dixon.
In a recent interview I conducted with Mullins (2014), he described his rationale in choosing the images and their sequencing in this book. Starting with Michael Kenneally and his mother, he traced the typical path of many Irish people, from the rural homestead, to the country town, to the big city, whether in Ireland or abroad.Mullins seemed to have a particular attachment to Michael Kenneally and described him as the real embodiment of The Irish Countryman, as described by Arensberg. He is according to Mullins the signifier of something which hasn’t changed about life in the West of Ireland, something which can stand apart from the harsh and often soulless corporate driven environment of contemporary urban existence as a symbol of timeless return and freedom.While Lange is most renowned as a great documentary photographer, who demonstrated a remarkable ability to quickly empathize with and intimately portray the unique human circumstance of her subjects, Mullins (1998, p11), claims that in the Irish work she was also photographing the idea of a place. Quoting Lange directly, he says she was not searching for the particular in people, rather ‘a portrait of the country itself, its population, its customs, its mores, its atmosphere, the texture of its life. In these things you don’t approach individuals as individuals. You’re thinking on a different level’. Along with the images in his publication, Mullins also copied many of Lange’s original contact prints at the Oakland Museum Archive and placed these in the Ennis County Archives as a local resource.
If we are indeed seeing in Lange’s images of Ireland, thesignificationof something beyond the particulars of time and place, how does the usual indexical register of the documentary photographic image suddenly become so porous, so infused withineffable qualities such as atmosphere, or the texture of a way of life? Justin Carvillewho has written extensively on the history of photography in Ireland and also what he describes as Lange’s documentary humanism in this work, describes how the photograph is, in and of itself outside of language. However, through the very nature of linguistic discourse, the image once subjected to it’sscrutiny is drawn into the sphere of interpretation. It is here that the construction of meaning begins to form around familiar tropes, and also where memory influences how we actually see and understand the visual. Referencing Victor Burgin (1986, p51), inhis article for Affecting Irishness, Negotiating Cultural Identity within and Beyond the Nation (James. P. Byrne et al 2009), Carville notesthat language invades the visual ‘through memory and snatches of works and images that continually intermingle and exchange one for the other’. This process of exchange, or the circulation of signs through conscious or subconscious repetition is particularly contentious in post-colonial visualizations of the rural west of Ireland, long considered the last authentic stronghold of Irish cultural identity. Whenremembrance is so politically disputed, the denotative quality of the documentary image has becomeparticularly important, because of its illusory promise of providing a convincing reflection of truth. As a mnemonic site or trigger it also becomes a political device in the reconstruction process. It is clear that Lange was already influenced by a linguistically framed depiction of her field of investigation well in advancing of arriving in Ireland. Arnsberg’s anthropological observations to a large degree predetermined what she anticipated and searched for in County Clare. It also influenced her decision to choose a rural context in an effort to find a form of community, connected to land, family and spiritual belief, which she felt had already vanished in America. In many respects her gaze was not only external to her context, but one which was looking backward, searching for visual traces of a way of life which was pre-urban, pre industrial and pre-capitalist.
Luke Gibbons (1996, p39) describes such nostalgic evocations of an idealized past as resulting from ‘a very distinctive form of longing; nostos, to return home,’ caused by the loss of a sense of belonging.Carville (2009, p206)however sees a danger in the anthropological studies such as The Irish Countryman, intheir objectification ofthe Irish as the ‘primitive incarnate of Western Europe’, spatially and temporally dislocated from the rest of the Western world. Drawing upon Adrian Peace’s (1989, p89-111) critique of this form of study, as collections of odd facts and curiosities which portray the idiosyncratic, irrational and odd attributes of their subjects he comments that Lange’s photographs of Ireland ‘had already been framed by an anthropological discourse that constructed the rural Irish as earth-bound primitives, bonded to the land and geographically and temporally sheltered from the socially corrupting effects of industrial modernity.’ Gordon (2009, p372) in her autobiographical account of Lange in Ireland alsonotes that although the photographer did develop personal relationships with her subjects, ‘Nothing roughed up her misty, romanticized take, not the arduous labour, the poverty, or the emigration of so many of County Clare’s young to the United States’.
This perspective on Ireland was reinforced by the final text which accompanied the photo essay in Life magazine, describing the country as a place set apart, outside time, the originary source of the seed stock of many modern Americans. Thisidea of the Irish west, has a lineage dating back to travel journalsfrom the 16thcentury onwards, which perpetuate a descriptive trope of recurring themes and motifs.
But the myth of the west is as much a self-perpetuating construction, now marketed as a commodity fetish, as it is a reality, and its visualisation has a particular iconographic register, whichLange’s work is not immune to. Since 1954 her work has in turn, become a site of re-visitation, even pilgrimage. Photographers including Robert Wallis and John Kelly, as well as filmmaker Deirdre Lynch have revisited Lange’s sites to reshoot the places and descendants of her subjects. Daniel Dixon also revisited County Clare on several occasions following his mother’s death, giving a series of public lectures on the 1954 journey.
How to Shoot an Irish Countryman
For the purpose of this presentation, I willnow limit my discussion to a comparative analysis of the photographic representation ofone of Lange’s topics, the Irish Countryman. I will compare her work to selected contemporary photographers, with the intention of visually demonstrating howcertain images are interchangeable within a lexicon of constructs usedto picture this subject.I will discuss two points in particular; the use of the black and white image verses colour, and the predisposition towards the anthropological gaze, both photographic strategies which have generated a deep memory imprint on collectively held ideas about what the Irish Countryman actually looks like.
Luke Gibbons (1996, p197), in discussing Muiris Mac Gonghails documentary on the Blasket Islands, Oilean Eile and John Hinde's surreally nostalgic pastiches of Irish life, comments on the shock of seeing the myth of the west in full colour in both artists work. Justin Carville has also made the point that ‘the black and white documentary photograph can be identified as playing a pivotal role in cementing contemporary notions of a fixed, Irish identity, to an authentic verifiable past.’ More than anything else it is the use of colour which ties the photographic image to a particular time period, determined by specifies of the mediums technical capabilities as aesthetic sensibility. Stripping the colour register, places the image in a space which is often difficult to temporally locate. The publicationIreland – A Week in the Life of A Nation (1986), which brought together the work of fifty photographers, both Irish and international, provides an interesting examplethis interplay between monochromacity, colour and temporal register. All images presented were taken during one week in late August 1985, and the final edit includes five familiar categories in the photographic representation of Ireland, the well-established dichotomy of the urban-rural divide, being the first chapter ‘ Rural Dreams and Urban Wakings’. Denis Waugh’s image of a shop front in Mayo recalls Lange’s image of a similar theme. However where colour locates Waughsimage within a definite time span, with memories specific and limited to that period, Lange’srepresentation opens out in a form of timeless regression.
InGeray Sweeney’s portrait of the countryman Patrick Kelly in his cottage in Mayo, the long exposure, soft focus and warm glow of the colour cast, serve to expressively skew the color register, evoking a generic hearth in the centre of the traditional homestead, the Bachelardian light of the campfire of eternal return, rather than providing an accurate representation. In a similar manner, photographers including Jake Wallis, John Claridge and PeterLavery, useheavy filters, vignetting, and colourmanipulationto generate a romantic overhang in images, particularly landscape shots of rural western locations. There are inconsistencies in Lavery’s stylistic approach even within the same publication.
Martin Parr did use his signature color palette in this publication but has also produced at series of black and white images, using the same well worn motifs as Lange.
While the monochromatic does suggests a timelessness, colourbe used to effectively skew perceptions of both temporal linearity and the authenticity of the image. Viewing Lange’s image of a traditional cottage and vegetable patch, alongside similar renditions of this motif, by Jake Wallis, Jackie Nickerson and Mespoulet & Mignon demonstrates how even slight fluctuations in colour radically distort perceptions of historical narrative sequence. The French women Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon visited Ireland in 1913 as part of a worldwide project titled the Archives of the Planet, an international ethnographic survey, sponsored by Albert Kahn, and created the first ever colour images of Ireland, using the autochrome plate process.
Among these are the exquisitely beautiful studies of women of the Claddagh area of Galway. There is a surreal quality to these particular shots, as do not expect to see this subject matter in deep saturated tones, and wonder if it isn’t a contemporary reconstruction, a performative image.
In the case of Bill Doyle’s work on the Aran Islands, aptly titled Another World, the impression of that we are witnessing a play, or film still in the monochromatic images, is pushed into the realm of surreal once colour in introduced in the publication Island Funeral.
The issue of authenticity verses the performative or constructed image, and the problematical ethnographic gaze, is of course only a recent post-modern addition to discourses surrounding documentary photographic practice.
The contemporary Irish artist Deirdre O’Mahony, as part of recent Doctoral research, has used relational and community based projects to actively question the positioning of the rural subject in anthropological studies such as Arensberg’s. In her dissertationNew Ecologies between Rural Life and Visual Culture in the West of Ireland: History, Context, Position, and Art Practice (2011, p179-82) she describes how in 2008, working with sociologist Anne Byrne, she facilitated a re-reading of original diaries kept by Solon Kimball, Arensbergchief collaborator during the Harvard anthropological survey. Through herX-PO project, she established a community-based space to build a shared archive of local history, through which indigenous stories of place, including a substantial vernacular photographic archive could be shared. She comments, ‘The importance of the project rested in the collective reflexive process that publicly complicated the old anthropological oppositions – what Foster calls an ‘us-here-and-now versus a them-there-and-then’, adding that having the opportunity to speak their own truth of life in the community of Rinnamona, was for descendants of the original subjects studied, a way of resolving the sense of being bound by a certain version of themselves. This reflexive operation, by which the image generated by the expert outsiderbecomes a representation of self which is simultaneously internalized, yet resisted, even parodied through re-performance gesture, is part of the post-colonial legacy in Ireland. It often becomes visible as a very deliberate staging of Irishness, especially for the outsiders gaze.
In Deirdre Lynches Photos to Send,there are definite moments where Lange’s original subjects, being interviewed by Lynch, are clearly and consciously re-performing to camera a version of themselves fromLange’swork.Her photographs have become a reflexive mirror of place, of time and of self. We see Michael Keneally, try to reassume the same physical pose on the very spot he stood for the famous 1954 shot, whileself-consciously glancing into the camera as though it were a mirror to help him correct any errors. It is these moments where the constructed or collectively shared idea of an identity momentarily slips, doubles back upon itself as mnemonic déjà vu, or becomes surreally absurd that I find particularly interesting.
But how does a photographer revisitsuch loaded iconography, incorporating into a documentary paradigm a framework which both avoids re-objectification, and captures this reflexive dynamic. The American photographer Jackie Nickerson, who is often compared to Lange, and who made her breakthrough in Ireland with the series Faith (2007), has been highly criticized for perpetuating an anthropological approach to her subjects. Nickerson removes her subjects from context, photographing them in deliberately assumed poses against neutrally toned walls or expanses of sky, so all that remains is the face or gesture. She creates miniature typologies based on occupation, whether of the religious orders, the inhabitants of a rural community in County Louth, or most recently farm workers in South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The London based Irish photographer Anna Rackard, in her series Farmers, investigates women on the land in rural Irish communities. Medium format, centralized, full body portraits, with the subjects placed in the middle-ground, parallel to the lens, all gazing directly into the camera create the uniformity and clarity expected of a genre of documentary realism, inherited from German New Objectivity.
Jim Vaughan, in his series This Time This Place (2007), takes a slightly less predictable approach to capturing contemporary life on Clare Island, County Mayo. Working on a community-based project, his intention was to deliberately avoid using stereotypical depictions of island life. All images are taken from a distance, with subjects disinterested in the camera and engaged in the more banal moments of regular daily life.
In Grainne Quinlan's recent series Strawboys (2013), there is a return to the well worn and much photographed subject matter of an ethnographically curious local rural custom. And yet there is something oddly incongruous about these images, beyond the obvious eccentricity of the costumes worn by the sitters. The images have a surreal quality tapping into more than simple indexical register of another odd local phenomenon.