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 fiftynine 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 only nineteen of 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 and Lange 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, the signification of 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 with ineffable qualities such as
atmosphere, or the texture of a way of life? Justin Carville who 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’s
scrutiny 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),
in his article for
Affecting Irishness, Negotiating Cultural Identity within and Beyond the Nation (James. P.
Byrne et al 2009), Carville notes that 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. When remembrance is
so politically disputed,
the denotative quality of the documentary image has become
particularly 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, in their objectification of the 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 also notes 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. This idea of the Irish west,
has a lineage dating back to travel journals from the 16th century 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,
which Lange’s work is not immune to. Since 1954 her work has in turn, become a site of revisitation, 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 will now limit my discussion to a comparative analysis
of the photographic representation of one of Lange’s topics, the Irish Countryman. I will
compare her work to selected contemporary photographers, with the intention of visually
demonstrating how certain images are interchangeable within a lexicon of constructs used to
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 publication Ireland – A Week in the
Life of A Nation (1986), which brought together the work of fifty photographers, both Irish and
international, provides an interesting example this 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 Waughs image within a definite time
span, with memories specific and limited to that period, Lange’s representation opens out in a
form of timeless regression.
In Geray 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 Peter Lavery, use
heavy filters, vignetting, and colour manipulation to 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, colour be 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 dissertation New 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, Arensberg chief
collaborator during the Harvard anthropological survey. Through her X-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 outsider
becomes 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 from Lange’s work. 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, while self-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 revisit such 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.
In his series, The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization (2007) the contemporary New Zealand
based photographer John Lake, presents what he describes; in his accompanying thesis
(2008) as a synthesis of the ethnographic documentary indexical record with surrealist
methods; including the use of chance, serendipity, derive and juxtapositions of the found
taken image, to bring to vision the underlying individual and collective subconscious.
However, unlike the constructed images of figures such as Crewdson, who are considered
surrealist due to the oneiric quality of their work, Lake describes how he aims to capture
where the fantasy of the Real is ruptured by the absurdity of the spectacle, central to how we
perform contemporary life. He identifies this as occurring particularly in moments of
collectively shared and performed rituals, where the surreal quality of events can actually
disrupt rationality, in a way similar to the original surrealist hope inducing revolution through
liberation of the subconscious in the everyday.
In concluding this very brief presentation, I will say that in current practice-based
investigations I am working with both a documentary and a surrealist rationale to address how
photograph, particular within its vernacular everyday uses operates as a site of return. I think
finding solutions to juxtapose both approaches is necessary to show how the subconscious
processes of memory are linked to the iconographic language of the photograph which is
always indexically tied to the real.
Works Referenced:
Lange, D. (1954) Copies of contact sheets from Ireland, housed at the Ennis County Archive.
Arensberg, C. (1937). The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study, MacMillian, N.Y.
Burgin, V. (1986) The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity, MacMillian, London.
Carville, J. (2009) ‘A Sympathetic Look’: Documentary Humanism and Irish Identity in
Dorothea Lange’s ‘Irish Country People’, in James. P. Byrne (et al), Affecting Irishness,
Negotiating Cultural Identity Within and Beyond The Nation.Peter Lang Publications Inc.
Carville, J. (2011) Photography and Ireland, Reaktion Books Ltd.
Doyle. B. (1999) The Aran Islands, Another World, The Liliput Press Ltd.
Gibbons, L. (1996) Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork University Press.
Gordon,L. (2009) Dorothea Lange, A Life Beyond Limits, W. W. Norton & Company, N.Y.
Mac Gonghail, M. (2000) Island Funeral, Veritas Publications.
Mullins, G. (1998) Dorothea Lange’s Ireland, Roberts Rinehart Publishers.
Mullins, G. (2014) Interview with Martina Cleary, Dublin, May 8th.
Theses
Lake, J. (2008) Documentary Photography and the Fantasy of the Real, Unpublished MFA
thesis, Massey University, Wellington.
O’Mahony, D (2011) New Ecologies between Rural Life and Visual Culture in the West of
Ireland: History, Context, Position, and Art Practice, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of
Brighton.
DVD
Lynch, D. (2002) Photos to Send, A Re-edit by Gerry Mullins (courtesy of the editor).
Ropelewski, T. (2010) Child of Giants, My Journey with Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange.
Newspaper and Magazine Articles
Clare Champion (2004) ‘Its Been a lange, lange, time, 31 December, pp. 16-17.
Clare Champion (2009) ‘Us Gallery in plea over identity of 1950’s Clare girl’, 20 March, pp.18.
Life (1955) ‘Irish Country People’, 21 March, pp 137-43.
The Irish Times (2005) ‘Mother of all photojournalism’, 30 April, pp.6.
Internet Pages
Lake, J. http://john-lake.squarespace.com (accessed 20.06.2014).
Nickerson,J. http://www.jackienickerson.com (accessed 22.06.2014).
Quinlan, G. http://grainnequinlan.com (accessed 20.06.2014).
Rackard, A. http://www.annarackard.com (accessed 18.06.2014).
Vaughan, J http://www.jimvaughanphotography.com (accessed 18.06.2014).