High and dry society

Magnum photo agency's exhibition at IMMA shows the many faces of Ireland, from rural chaps to city dwellers. No liggers allowed, says Billy Leahy

Magnum Ireland, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin. www.imma.ie until 18 June

The Irish middle class makes for dull subject matter. All immaculately preened, plucked and coiffed, complete with a flute of pink bubbly in one hand and a peace-signing Bono on the other, the bourgeoisie peer forth with pristine predictability from the society pages. These louche liggers may put a happy snapper's kids through college, but for Magnum photographers, Irish society has never been and never will be documented on the back pages of the Sindo. And that is something we can all be grateful for.

Spread across two exhibition spaces at IMMA, Magnum Ireland, a collection of the photographic agency's finest images since the post-war years, appears as a record of the seismic changes in Irish society over the last 50 years. And apart from the odd appearance at the Horse Show at the RDS, the middle class is notable by its absence.

Images of rural society dominate the early stages, with rows of capped chaps chewing the cud and crinkled, curmudgeonly old men propping up pub counters providing plenty of fodder for Henri Cartier-Bresson and his cohorts on their early forages into the heart of the real Ireland. Urban pictures from the 1950s and 1960s focus mainly on the ever-photogenic working class, with romantic ideals surely secreted just beneath the surface of the sullied face of the street urchin and the furrowed brow of the weary drinker.

As one would expect with Magnum, the photographs are faultlessly framed, with composition at times breathtakingly subtle, with hints and suggestions of pattern repetition emerging here and playful shadows thrown there. Visually, Martin Parr's images of Lisendell and The Maze series by Donovan Wylie prove definite high points along with the startling ease with which Cartier-Bresson produces frame after frame of flawless photography.

The early exercises in photography's formal disciplines, so brilliantly exemplified by Cartier-Bresson, soon fade into the background when the exhibition moves into the period of The Troubles during the 1970s. The style here touches on newspaper-esque photojournalism, which emerges to reflect the political subject matter. All the while, the quickening pace of modernisation is very palpable, especially through the images of the 1980s and 1990s.

The rural and city-dwelling working class continue to dominate the images until the dawn of the noughties, when the selection of photographs seems to have been orchestrated to highlight the Celtic Tiger era. Carl de Keyzer's loose style focuses on an affluent middle class dispensing of their disposable gleefully in Avoca, while overly tended-to offspring demand the latest toy whilst displaying an early understanding of conspicuous consumption.

Elsewhere, photos of savvy urbanites at play, Trinity Ballers and a tortuous looking dinner party (complete with acoustic-guitar playing host) have been plucked from Stuart Franklin's Dublin 2003 series (which, for the record, covers all social backgrounds in modern Dublin). This selection especially has ensured critics and commentators have clamoured to claim these images as evidence of new eras being heralded in by the next generation ... these "Celtic Tiger cubs". Such obvious observations, however, seem more than a little trite; in fact, they run the risk of being as patronising and erroneous as the increasingly fashionable parlance that "we're all middle class now" ... even if the middle class has become more photogenic.