ART: A certain regard
Billy Leahy looks through the huge collection of news photography at Irish Independent Century (1905-2005) at the National Photographic Archive
The recent dusting down of Paul Lennon's documentary The Rocky Road To Dublin by the Irish Film Institute gave the public a unique record of Irish society in the 1960s. Last seen in this country in 1968 (it was the final film screened at the Cannes film festival that year before it was prematurely shutdown in a show of solidarity with the Paris revolts), Lennon's feature, with the question "what do you do with a revolution once you've won?", analysed the control exerted on Ireland by the Catholic Church after the shackles of British occupation had been shed.
Maybe it all started with the publication of Brian Lalor's Encyclopaedia of Ireland a couple of years ago. The mammoth oeuvre, designed for only the sturdiest of coffee tables, is now proving to be the first of several documents to shove Ireland in front of the mirror for a bout of self-analysis and a bit of old-fashioned historical scrutiny.
But just after Lennon's excellent Raoul Coutard-filmed documentary finished its all-too-short run, came the publication of Magnum's Ireland, a collection of the photographic agency's best images since the post-war years. The Irish Museum of Modern Art is planning an exhibition centred on these photographs – but we will have to wait until next spring.
In the meantime, the National Photographic Archives at Meeting House Square in Temple Bar is displaying a range of newspaper images of our fair and green isle, taken over the course of the last 100 years. The exhibition marks the centenary of the Irish Independent, and celebrates the donation by Independent Newspapers of more than 300,000 images to the National Library of Ireland. The good news for those readers unfortunate/fortunate (delete as appropriate) to live in Dublin is that 50,000 are already scanned and uploaded onto the online archive – which is a nice way to alleviate office boredom.
The exhibition itself, titled A Century of News Photography, pulls 106 prints from the sizeable portfolio and provides a headline view of Ireland that reveals as much about Ireland's media as it does about its society. Arranged by decade, the early photographs are eerily, and scarily, reminiscent of Leaving Cert History textbooks. The famous 1919 photo of Harry Boland, Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera at the first meeting of Dáil Éireann, the crumpled dome of the Custom's House during the Civil War and the construction of the Shannon hydroelectric scheme in 1928 are enough to provoke schoolroom memories to come flooding back with a half-tear of anguish.
As you might expect, the selection focuses heavily on what was probably the leading photograph of the Irish Independent on that day and therefore has a heavy political focus. But alongside these, we are afforded snip-shots of Irish society, culturally significant events – such as Seamus Heaney and WB Yeats following their Nobel Prize wins and The Beatles at Dublin's Adelphi Cinema in 1963 – as well as the odd quirky photograph, like Amelia Earhart sitting on her plane in a Derry field in 1932.
The best of the Indo's sporting collection is housed on the first floor of the building and again, all the usual suspects are present and correct. Perusing through the photographs, it is easy to imagine that if the archives were delved into a little more deeply, a more fascinating and off-beat exhibition might have been staged. Instead, the images seem a little over-familiar. But with that in mind, it is perhaps only when we try to picture the society behind the photographs that they assume a more interesting level. Watching senior politicians and senior clergymen cosy up in some of the works recalls Lennon's Rocky Road and the answer to the central question in the documentary: "hand the power back to the elite."
More A century of news photography: Irish Independent Centenary continues at the National Photographic Archive, Temple Bar until 21 March 2006. www.nli.ie