Kerry Writers’ Museum has constructed a camera obscura so that people can experience what it is like to be inside a camera. Curators drilled a hole in a shutter on a window overlooking the square in Listowel and an image of St. John’s Theatre and Arts Centre is projected through the hole on to the wall opposite, upside down and back to front.
“We are the only museum in Ireland to have installed a camera obscura in the classic sense of drilling a small hole in a wall and turning a darkened room into a camera” says director Cara Trant. Another camera obscura will open in the north later this month, but it uses a roof mounted system manufactured by the Astronomy Centre in Lancashire. The Listowel camera, on the other hand, takes the viewer back to the origins of photography over 400 years ago.
Ciarán Walsh came up with the idea while designing an exhibition built around the Bolex 16mm camera used by local film makers John Lynch and Michael Mulcahy. “We wanted to celebrate analogue cinematography, so we put people inside a room sized camera” he says. “It’s very interactive. You stand in the dark, let your eyes adjust and the image appears. Put your finger over the hole in the shutter and it disappears. It’s immersive and mesmerising”.
The project has become the springboard for much bigger exploration of the link between storytelling and filmmaking in Listowel and beyond. The Heritage Council supported the project with a grant of €40,000 under the Heritage Support Fund and the museum hopes to raise awareness of the importance of community film making, amateur film and home movies as important heritage assets that can easily disappear.
The camera obscura is open to the public and all you need to do is turn up at Kerry Writers’ Museum and ask them to turn the lights out.
Thumbnails/ Captions / Descriptions
Curator Ciarán Walsh spends 20 seconds inside the camera obscura in Kerry Writers’ Museum (photo Kerry Writers’ Museum).
Description: Walsh used his mobile phone as a light source that doesn’t overwhelm the light from outside. The image projected features St John’s Theatre on the Square in Listowel. The clock (upside down and back to front) shows the time.
Shane Batten checks the aperture of the camera obscura in Kerry Writers Museum, Listowel (photo Kerry Writers’ Museum).
Description: The aperture is a 10mm hole drilled in a shutter on a window overlooking the square in Listowel. Batten holds a lens salvaged from a slide projector over the aperture to see what affect if any it has on the projection (the mage remained in focus for a couple of inches and was much smaller, so we discarded the lens).
Shane Batten checks the aperture of the camera obscura in Kerry Writers Museum, Listowel (photo Kerry Writers’ Museum).
Description: The aperture is a 10mm hole drilled in a shutter on a window overlooking the square in Listowel. Batten holds a lens salvaged from a slide projector over the aperture to see what affect if any it has on the projection (the mage remained in focus for a couple of inches and was much smaller, so we discarded the lens).
Shane Batten spends 20 seconds inside the camera obscura (photo Ciarán Walsh, Kerry Writers’ Museum).
Description: Batten used his mobile phone as a light source that doesn’t overwhelm the light form outside. The image projected features St John’s Theatre on the Square in Listowel. The clock (upside down and back to front) shows the time.
Historical Note
The term camera obscura (dark room) was first used in 1604 to describe a completely darkened room in which a small hole is made in one wall so that the scene outside is projected on to a screen on the wall opposite. The rays of light bend around the hole and the scene appears upside-down and mirrored, although colour and perspective are not affected. The smaller the hole, the sharper the image, but it may take several minutes for your eyes to adjust to the darkness enough to see the image.
A miniature of this room became known as a “camera” and experiments in fixing the projected image led to the invention of photography in 1826. Nicéphore Niépce experimented with material that hardened on exposure to light and he produced his first picture after an “exposure” of eight hours. it takes twenty seconds max to get a properly exposed photograph inside the camera obscura in Listowel.
an illustration of a camera obscura in Athanasius Kircher’s, Ars magna lucis et umbrae (The Magnetic Art of Light and Shadow), 1646 (creative Commons)
In 2020, TCD announced plans to deal with its colonial legacy and we asked Provost Paddy Prendergast if he had heard of the stolen skulls held in TCD. The repatriation of these remains would, we proposed, be a good way to start decolonising the campus. He agreed but TCD changed its mind when the Anatomy Dept refused to repatriate the remains. A new round of negotiations with Provost Linda Doyle and her public engagement team on Sept 1, 2022.
A public history project in three parts. Part one deals with an attempt by communities to engage TCD in the repatriation of skulls stolen from three burial grounds in the west of Ireland in 1890. Part two responds to various arguments advanced by the skulls’ keepers in the”Old” Anatomy Dept in TCD and deals with the issues of provenance and folklore relating to the protection of burial grounds.
Part 1 : The case of the missing skulls from Inishbofin
“John Millington Synge poked fun at colonial science in The Playboy of the Western Worldwhen he referred to an anthropological collection in TCD. “Did you never hear tell” Jimmy asked Philly “of the skulls they have in the city of Dublin, ranged out like blue jugs in a cabin of Connaught?” In 2020, TCD announced plans to deal with its colonial legacy and I joined real-life descendants of Synge’s characters in asking Provost Paddy Prendergast if he had heard of the same skulls. The repatriation of these skulls would, we proposed, be a good way to start decolonising the campus.”
Part 2: ‘Don’t kick that skull or the dead will come after you!’
“Covid restrictions have forced us all to think about traditions relating to death and dying. The case of the Inishbofin skulls at TCD has added a curious twist to that story. An investigation into the provenance of those skulls has uncovered a long-forgotten tradition of placing skulls in medieval ruins and an associated body of folklore that warned people against interfering with them. The message was simple: don’t kick that skull or the dead will come after you!”
Inishbofin Heritage Museum presents ‘Returning Home’, an outdoor exhibition of photographs taken in Inishbofin 1893. The aim is to add living faces to the anthropological collection of human remains that Trinity College, University of Dublin released for burial in 2023. The exhibition includes a photograph Alfred Cort Haddon took of the skulls he stole from St Colman’s Monastery in 1890, which triggered a ten-year campaign for the return and burial of the remains. The exhibition is located on the old pier, the same spot that Charles R. Browne measured the heads of Islanders in 1893.
Browne was the first (and only) graduate of a small Anthropology Dept that Prof Daniel J. Cunningham established in the Anatomy Dept of Trinity College in 1891. Browne and his brother John were keen photographers and they systematically documented the topography, people, modes of life and archaeology of eight districts in the west of Ireland, which they surveyed between 1892 and 1900 as agents of the Anthropological Laboratory in Trinity College.
Haddon and Cunningham set up the laboratory in 1891 and mobilised it for an ethnographic survey of the Aran Islands in 1892. The laboratory moved to Inishbofin in 1893 for a second survey. Haddon visited the island during a survey of fishing ground in 1890 and recorded the theft of thirteen skulls from St Colman’s Monastery in his journal. He also took a photograph of the skulls in situ. Haddon intended returning to Inishbofin in 1893, but Cunningham dropped him from the survey because of his home rule sympathies and radically anti-colonial attitudes.
‘Returning Home’ features 11 photographs from the photographic archive Browne compiled in 1897. Inishbofin features in one of two albums that record the work of the Anthropological Laboratory. A selection of these photographs were included in ‘The Irish Headhunter’ exhibition in 2012, which toured the districts the Browne surveyed. Marie Coyne noticed the photograph Haddon took of the stolen skulls and this triggered a ten-year campaign to have the remains returned for burial.
The campaign concludes on Sunday 16 July 2023 when the remains will be buried in the grounds of St Colman’s Monastery, one hundred and thirty three years to the day after they were stolen.
To mark the occasion, Inishbofin Heritage Museum and The Library of Trinity College,University of Dublin has given permission for a limited edition print of Haddon’s photograph of the ‘stolen skull’. Copies can be purchase here.
The entire collection of Browne photographs in Trinity College is freely available online.
In 2007, Ciarán Walsh discovered an album of John Millington Synge’s photographs that Lilo Stephen’s published on the centenary of his death in 1971. He tracked the original negatives to TCD, and Felicity O’Mahony in the Manuscript Library arranged to have them digitised by Tim Keeffe, now head of digital services in the Chester Beatty Library. Walsh commissioned a new set of prints for an exhibition that opened on Inis Meáin in 2009, on the centenary of Synge’s death. Shortly afterwards, Felicity O’Mahony showed Walsh the photographs Charles R. Browne took in the islands in 1892. That was the start of www.curator.ie and the first a series of public engagement projects built around newly discovered photographic archives associated with the Aran Islands.
This project deals with the photography of John Millington Synge. It has been curated by Ciarán Walsh to commemorate the centenary of the writer’s death in 2009. The photographs are held in the Library, Trinity College Dublin and are shown with the permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.
Synge bought a second hand camera during his first visit to the Aran Islands and the exhibition consists of photographs which were taken in Connemara, Wicklow and West Kerry between 1898 and 1905. There are 51 surviving photographs which form part of the Synge manuscript collection in the Library, Trinity College. Dublin. The original glass plates (23) and surviving print photographs have been restored and digitalised by the Library, TCD, especially for this exhibition. It is the first time they will have been exhibited.
Synge had intended using these to illustrate his account of life on the Aran Islands but illustrations by Jack B. Yeats were used instead in the first edition. Yeats based many of his illustrations on Synge’s photographs including the iconic drawing of ’An Island Man’ which was based on a photograph taken by Synge on Inis Oirr.
This is not social documentary photography, The exhibition deals with Synge’s photographs in terms of the arrival of a new artform (photography) and the beginning of a ‘folk’ imagination of the ‘real Ireland’ which has its origins in documentary photographs of the ‘West.’ Synge’s photography represents a seminal moment in the imagination of ‘Irishness’ which has been either overlooked or treated as mere illustration in a literary context. The exhibition is a celebration of John Millington Synge as a pioneering photographer.
Exhibitions:
The Synge photographs in IMMA on the opening of ‘The Moderns’ on 19.10.2010. Photography was not allowed so I strapped my phone to my ankle.
The critically acclaimed exhibition of photographs by John Millington Synge that was curated by Ciarán Walsh in 2009 has been incorporated into a major survey of modern art in Ireland that is currently on show in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The exhibition was reproduced from the original glass plates and prints held by the Manuscript Library of Trinity College Dublin, under the direction of Felicity O’Mahony. They were printed by Dan Scully of the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, and framed by Ger Gleasure, of Tralee. The exhibition was first shown on Inis Meáin, the Aran Islands – the island most associated with Synge. It was co-curated by Tarlach de Blacam of Inis Meáin Knitwear. It was a huge hit, generating widespread coverage in the national print and broadcast media. It toured to Paris under the direction of Sheila Pratschke of Le Centre Culturel Irlandais and received an equally enthusiastic welcome. Paris, after all, regards Synge as one of its own.
The Photography of John Millington Synge on show in Inis Meáin Knitwear, the Aran Islands. Photo: Ciaran Walsh, www.curator.ie.
The exhibition in IMMA is important. As the museum’s publicity describes it:
“The most extensive exhibition to date from the Museum’s own collection, The Moderns, will explore the development of modernity in Ireland through the visual arts in the period 1900 to 1975. Focussing in the innovative and the experimental, it will examine this subject through a broad, interdisciplinary approach.
The exhibition will bring together exceptional examples of painting and sculpture, photography and film, architecture, literature, music and design of the period. Curated mainly from IMMA’s Collection, it will also include superb loans from the public and private collections in Ireland and beyond.
The Moderns will explore many of the key artistic movements of the period, including the paintings of Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone and other supporters of European Modernism in the context of the iconic achievements in design and literature of Eileen Gray and James Joyce. It will reflect the works and influence of John Millington Synge, Paul Henry and the Yeats family and external forces as seen in the work of Klee and Picasso. The impact of the ground-breaking ROSC exhibitions in the 1960s and ’70s, and of Minimal and Conceptual Art, in the works of Brian O’Doherty, Barry Flanagan and Michael Craig-Martin, will also be examined.”
The Photography of John Millington Synge, Le Centre Culturel Irlandais, Director Sheila Pratschke. January 2010. Photo: Le Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris.
Original glass plate negatives of photographs around Ireland by J.M. Synge. Previous reproductions were published in a book titled My Wallet, in 1971.
‘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.
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.
Shane Batten checks the aperture of the camera obscura in Kerry Writers Museum, Listowel (photo Kerry Writers’ Museum).
Shane Batten checks the aperture of the camera obscura in Kerry Writers Museum, Listowel (photo Kerry Writers’ Museum).
