Ireland in Focus: Photographing the 1950s

There’s some big names attached to this relatively compact exhibition in Collins Barracks. Ireland in Focus sees what heavyweight photographers Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Cresswell saw when they were sent here on assignment in the 1950s. Welcome to a world of fair days, roadshows, Corpus Christi processions, sheep-shearing, ebullient seminaries and race days. Lange’s look at us for Life Magazine entitled: ‘Irish Country People: Serenely They Live in Age-Old Patterns’ seems to play to its prescribed gallery. Cartier-Bresson’s work for Harper’s Bazaar also seems to have a rose-tint to its observations. Cresswell is probably the most intriguing of the three as the was here researching his seminal anthropological study, A Rural Community in Ireland. His Kodachrome slide prints taken in Kinvara in Clare in the mid-fifties have less sheen and, therefore, the closest sense of authenticity. Nostalgia tripping stuff for more ‘innocent’ times is on full exposure. Gently absorbing.

National Museum of Ireland until April 2020