"Nothing seems better suited than photography to give an absolutely faithful historical picture of our time..."
This chapter is about anonymous Irish photography as history. About interpretations of Ireland through its anonymous photography, it covers 100 years of history, from 1880 to 1980. The period spanned was witness to fundamental change. The history of photography belongs to this history, was influenced by it and in turn influences how we perceive and understand it.
This thesis includes anonymous photography itself as a subject, a field of investigation. It reflects upon the tradition it stakes out for itself, upon the possibilities and opportunities for an Irish art of the anonymous photograph.
As the famous documentary photographer Robert Frank once said photographic seeing could be a kind of photographic destiny, in this study the investigation leads to the reconsideration of Irish Photography. This medium was not born as a medium of art: it became one within specific circumstances, and in Ireland those specific circumstances included certain ideas and expectations about the role of the representational arts in Ireland.
Anonymous Irish photographers came to realizations about the capabilities of their medium in circumstances shaped by history, a history their work in turn helps us better to see and understand. So it is with art, which by its character as a formalization of emotion and idea in relation to physical objects, which translates history into experience. The dialectic between artworks and cultural process is no different in the case of photographs. Camera made images have no special privilege as documents of culture. But they have their own resources, different in kind from those of paint, stone or ink.
One way in which anonymous photographs belong to this history is as illustrations of the past, of the look of places, people, events and things. By looking not at the scenes or people depicted but by looking at the point of view of the photograph itself, the interpretation it allows viewers to make of the subject. > >