‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ opens in the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) on 15 October 2023. The exhibition features twenty five photographs that are organised around a slideshow Haddon presented in 1890 and titled ‘The Aran Islands’. It was the first in a series of slideshows that made the islanders visible at a critical moment in the development of cultural nationalism and literary modernism. ‘The Aran Islands’ slideshow is the cornerstone of Ciarán Walsh’s book Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage, which was launched in the RAI on 31 October. Restrictions on ‘illustration‘ limited the number and scale of photographs reproduced in the book and the solution was to show them in an exhibition, mimicking Haddon’s adoption of the slideshow when cost became a barrier to the publication of these photographs in 1890. ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ is about photography and the exhibition features new fine art prints from digitally remastered scans of negatives discovered in 2014. They are framed by a series of photographs that deal with Haddon’s influences and impact. Most of these photographs have never been exhibited before and the exhibition constitutes a radical look at the photographic record of the islands and the origins of visual anthropology.
Andrei Nacu and Ciarán Walsh, curators of the ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ exhibition at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. Photo Hanine Habib.
LEFT: Anon. 1890. Green, Lane, Haddon, Beamish. Digital print of cyanotype. MAA P.48150.ACH2, with permission of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. RIGHT: A. F. Dixon. 1890. Untitled. Digital print of silver gelatine photograph pasted into Dixon’s family album. NLI VTls000284434_005 (detail), with permission of the National Library of Ireland.
‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ opened in the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) on 15 October 2023. The exhibition features twenty five photographs that are organised around a slideshow Haddon presented in 1890 and titled ‘The Aran Islands’. It was the first in a series of slideshows that made the islanders visible at a critical moment in the development of cultural nationalism and literary modernism.
‘The Aran Islands’ slideshow is the cornerstone of Ciarán Walsh’s book Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage, which was launched in the RAI on 31 October. Restrictions on ‘illustration‘ limited the number and scale of photographs reproduced in the book and the solution was to show them in an exhibition, mimicking Haddon’s adoption of the slideshow when cost became a barrier to the publication of these photographs in 1890.
‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ is about photography and the exhibition features new prints from negatives discovered in 2014 and digitally remastered in 2019. They are framed by a series of photographs that deal with Haddon’s influences and impact. Most of these photographs have never been exhibited before and the exhibition constitutes a radical look at the photographic record of the islands and the origins of visual anthropology.
A. F. Dixon. 1890. Untitled. Digital print of silver gelatine, glass-plate negative (Ciarán Walsh and Ciarán Rooney, 2019). The original negative is held in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, University of Dublin. © curator.ie.
From nineteenth century photographic negative to twenty-first century digital print: Dixon took this photograph on Inis Meáin in 1890 under direction from Haddon. On his return to Dublin, Haddon sent the negatives to R. J. Welch in Belfast to be processed as lantern slides. Welch returned them and Dixon, it appears, placed them on shelf in a workshop under the anatomy theatre, where they remained undiscovered until 2014. The negatives were in good condition and many still had the original ‘photoshopping’ Welch carried out. By 2019, it was apparent that they needed immediate conservation but the Old Anatomy Steering Group did not have a budget for it and, with their agreement, I commissioned Ciarán Rooney | Filmbank to digitise the negatives. In addition, I commissioned a set of exhibition ready, fine art prints from digitally remastered files. In 2023, Andrei Nacu and I selected 15 of the prints for exhibition in the Royal Anthropological Institute and Andrei made a new set of prints from the remastered digital negatives. We adde ten other prints from collections in Dublin, Belfast, Cambridge and Australia to situate Haddon’s project in a wider experiment that culminated in the first use of colour photography – unsuccessful – and cinematography in ethnographic fieldwork.
