The Photo Album of Ireland
The Gallery of Photography, Dublin
The Gallery of Photography has a habit of springing surprises and it is certainly ready to produce exhibitions that you doubt you would see elsewhere (except possibly at the equally eccentric National Archive gallery 50m away across Meeting House Square). Whoever conceived the idea of separating two wonderful galleries with a Saturday farmers market was a genius, eating your way between excellent galleries is a great way to spend an afternoon!
The Photo Album of Ireland is a curious exhibition, both in its concept and the final result of its executiuon. The aim was to produce a collective album of the entire country, recording the people, their lives, holidays and daily experience by the means of their own photographs.
The Photo Album of Ireland is a curious exhibition, both in its concept and the final result of its executiuon. The aim was to produce a collective album of the entire country, recording the people, their lives, holidays and daily experience by the means of their own photographs.
Walking into the gallery space the first thing that strikes is the quantity of images, the huge central wall really does look like a giant photo album, I remember the US commentator Paddy Cheyefsky describing television as 'the wonderful world of the ordinary', this was the photographic equivalent, a family sit round the table as the candles burn on the birthday cake, people pose awkwardly for a wedding photo and a father poses with his children next to the family car on holiday. They are at once oddly personal, mundane, banal even, yet in the context they become hugely important and compelling.
Collections such as these always give room for the imagination to explore the possibilities in the images, to invent a back story in an attempt to fully understand the printed evidence in front of the viewer, a process that seemed to be deliberate in the way the exhibition was arranged, there was little explanation of individual images, instead they were presented as a collective whole. Some were playfully mysterious; an image of a family in the garden with their goat or a photo booth portrait that had been 'enhanced' with the addition of felt pen make up. Some were enigmatic for other reasons, crumpled or ripped images and one where a mans face had apparently been deliberately cut out seemed less happy and spoke of sorrow or loss, consistent themes in Irish history as many left its shores in waves of emigration. The exhibition showed a huge range of photographic materials from Daguerreotype formal portraiture, Box Brownies to the the glorious over saturated Instamatic film of the 1970s. This gives a sense of how the Irish democratised the business of image making and sense of collective history and culture. The aim of the project behind this exhibition is to let it grow, to continue to hoover up a collective archive that properly records a nation and its people, this exhibition being the first of a planned series. If this is be repeated I intend to be in queue for it, a wonderful, spirited at times joyous, at time touching, and always mysterious exhibition that was a privilege to have witnessed. (And the veg samosas in the farmers market were good too!) |