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innovate | engage | excite

I set up curator.ie in 2010 as a vehicle for innovative curatorial projects with a strong public engagement component and collaborative ethos. I specialise in bringing long-forgotten or overlooked photographic archives and collections into the public domain, usually through exhibitions curated in partnership with arts and heritage organisations.

Along the way I have curated several landmark projects in terms of the history of social documentary photography in Ireland. Clearly, these projects are never fully retrospective. Legacies matter. Recovering forgotten photography and film happens in the present and demands that we engage with contemporary practice.

A head and shoulder self portrait of curator Ciarán Walsh shot on quarter plate glass negative with high gloss black background that creates a positive from a wet colloidal negative, also known as an ambrotype. The shot required an exposure time of 17 seconds, so Ciarán Walsh stares at camera. The photo is is black and white but keeps the silver toning typical of the process. The design is based on a mock up of lantern slides used by Alfred Cort Haddon in the 1890s.

Innovation

I studied social documentary photography at the National College of Art and Design, enrolling in 1978 and graduating in 1984. Art education was transformed by a student revolution in 1971, which forced NCAD to recognise photography as  degree subject.

One year later, BBC broadcast John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and it revolutionised the study of photography. Also, anthropology became a requirement and opened a route to Structuralism and others theories of representation. The result was a long engagement with the idea of folk culture.

Ciarán Walsh and Patrick Cunningham digitised this photograph from Adrian Dixon's collection of John Joly material. The slide dates from around 1896 and is intended to demonstrate a viewing system for Joly's colour system. This involved placing a screen over an unexposed glass plate negative, exposing the negative, making a positive copy and placing a viewing screen over it. The screen was had very fine lines of coloured ink approximating to red, green and blue. These filtered the colour showing through the positive image and it registered as a colour photograph. The lines are visible in the finished photograph. The original is 3¼ × 5½in / 83 × 140mm

All is connected: placing Haddon and Synge at the centre of a long experiment in photography in the Aran Islands (© Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie).

Tensions between art and folk culture enlivened my work as curator at the National Folk Theatre of Ireland (1995-201). Authenticity is always an issue when talking about folk theatre. Indeed, tricky interactions between tradition, remembrance and identity become acute when comparing staged folk life with ethnographic “evidence”.

Thus began a drift into anthropology and I curated three projects in 2007 that explored conflicting representations of  folklife. The first was an academically naive essay on photographer Robert John Welch. The second was a collective self-portrait of Tory islanders, which was a response to Magnum photographer Martine Franck’s 1995 project.

The third was the most consequential of all – a centenary exhibition of John Millington Synge’s photographs. Long story short, Synge was a big hit and led to Charles R. Browne and Alfred Cort Haddon.They led to a box of photographs Andrew Francis Dixon took in the Aran Islands in 1890. Evidently, he left them on a shelf in TCD where they remained out of sight until I found them in 2014.

Discoveries don’t get much better than this and Dixon’s photographs became a five-year doctoral investigation of ethnographic photography. I showed how photography was a long-forgotten component  of the skull-measuring business in Ireland. The result is a radically new way of looking at Anglo-Irish ethnographic photography.

 

Collaborative Ethos

 

Public Engagement

 

Legacies

 

Current Projects

Ciarán Walsh and Patrick Cunningham digitised this photograph from Adrian Dixon's collection of John Joly material. The slide dates from around 1896 and is intended to demonstrate a viewing system for Joly's colour system. This involved placing a screen over an unexposed glass plate negative, exposing the negative, making a positive copy and placing a viewing screen over it. The screen was had very fine lines of coloured ink approximating to red, green and blue. These filtered the colour showing through the positive image and it registered as a colour photograph. The lines are visible in the finished photograph. The original is 3¼ × 5½in / 83 × 140mm

John Joly, c1896, Vase with Flowers (© Adrian Dixon Collection).

Turning a mediaeval castle into a community cinema: OPW’s monument care team with Rushes | Luachair  curator Laura Fitzgerald at a screening of Lorraine Neeson’s artwork Raven on 31 January 2026. L-R: Charlie Broderick, Paul Moynihan, Jim Counihan, Mike Moynihan, Laura Fitzgerald and artist Chris Steenson. (photo Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie).

Laura Fitzgerald installing her work in the Maurice Walsh exhibit at Kerry Writers’ Museum (photo: Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie)

A Midnight Court: Brendan Kennelly reads his poetry at Carrigafoyle Castle on 30 September 2025.

Photograph Tony Fitzmaurice took in 1953 in Ballybunion, Co Kerry, Ireland , shows two stylish young women lying on the grass on a summer afternoon. They are laughing.

Tony Fitzmaurice, circa 1960, Untitled, 35mm Kodak Safety black and white negative scanned by Kathy and Steve Reynolds.

16 July 2023: Tuuli Rantala and Marie Coyne carry ancestral remains to their resting place on Inishbofin after TCD gave in to a long campaign to have the remains returned for burial.

A. C. Haddon. 1892. Michael Faherty and two women of Inishmaan.

Address

Booleenshare, Ballyheigue,
Tralee,
Co Kerry, Ireland

V92 D5X0

Email: curator.ie@proton.me

Tel: +353872370846

 

 

 

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