Ciarán Walsh took this photograph with a pinhole camera during a workshop led by Cork-based artist Harry Moore. The workshop was part of an analogue film and photography mini-fest that Walsh curated for Heritage Week 2025. Inspired by Louis Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 3rd arrondissement (1838?), Walsh posed for 12 seconds against the wall of Kerry Writers’ Museum with St John.s Theatre and Culture Centre – a repurposed church – in the background. The long exposure prevented anything in motion being caught on the photographic media inside the camera. Although, this was far quicker than the 4 to 5 minutes Daguerre needed, the effect was the same – time stands still.
Kerry Writers’ Museum has just received €47,750 from the Heritage Council to continue recovering and archiving films shot in rural north Kerry. It brings total investment by the Heritage Council in this project – developed by Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie – to almost €100,000 over two years. The screening of Leo Finucane’s film Father And Son at Clounmacon Community Centre is a continuation of the community cinema programme and the first act of the second phase of this groundbreaking project.
The 2025 grant allows Kerry Writers’ Museum to complete its acquisition of two very important collections. The first is Jimmy Deenihan’s remarkable library of North Kerry Literary Trust recordings of Kerry writers and their associates. The second is the Tony Fitmaurice collection of photographs, which his niece Kathy Reynolds has given back to the people of Listowel and Ballybunion.
Heritage Council funding will also enable the museum to develop a viewing library with trained staff to provide free, public access to these and other collections as they are archived and digitized. That places Kerry Writers’ Museum at the forefront of a strategic drive to manage public engagement with archives like this at a local level. The partnership with Leo Finucane and Clounmacon Community Centre is an important part of that project.
A Very English Savage is aimed at a general reader and, so, breaks many conventions associated with academic publishing – no jargon, no lens, no footnotes and a novel system of referencing. curator.ie goes one step further in introducing an online component on the Ballymaclinton blog site. This picks up any loose ends, errata etc in the book as well as adding additional research that followed the end of writing. It also creates an online space for engagement with readers of the book.
As far as motivation goes, lack of space combined with the complexity of the ground covered meant that some arguments are heavily edited, with the inevitable consequence of loose ends. That prompted this experiment in hybrid, interactive and engaged publishing. After all, that is what Haddon did in the 1890s when he combined journalism and slideshows as a work around to limits on the publication of his photographs and his unorthodox, anticolonial views on the nature of anthropology.
The first ‘loose end’ on the list is, of course, Synge and his photography. That is where this whole project started way back in 2009 and, post publication, remains a very active area of investigation. I propose in A Very English Savage that Haddon’s work in the Aran Islands provided an ethnographic baseline for later work by literary modernists like Synge and cultural nationalists like Hyde. However, the evidence presented was limited to a series of outlines and the Ballymaclinton blog provides the space to publish the notes that furnished those outlines as well additional research carried out in 2023.
Other ‘loose ends‘ include what it meant to become an anthropologist in 2020, when a stand off between a humanitarian tradition of engaged anthropology and an academic discipline of political utility that achieved a level of controversy in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. This part of the series will pick up on what it means to engage with the history of anthropology at a time when the very idea of anthropology is contested and, so, add a critical and contemporary edge to the series. Work on this strand starts on 4 December 2023 with the inaugural, online conference of the History of Anthropology Network.
John Millington Synge. 1898, Digital photograph from scanned silver gelatine negative (Timothy Keefe, Sharon Sutton 2009). Courtesy of the Board of Trinity College, University of Dublin.
