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.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage is also a book about photography and it pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. I argue that this led to an experiment in cinematography in the Torres Strait in 1898 and, given his radically anticolonial attitude and subversive intent, these four minutes of film stand as a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology. I also argue against that Haddon’s slideshows about the Aran Islands were a form of anticolonial activism that provided an ethnographic baseline for cultural nationalists like Hyde and literary modernists like Synge. Academic publishing severely limits the scope for photography as an alternative to text and this aspect of Haddon’s work was explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, an exhibition of twenty five photographs at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savageis the first in depth study of Haddon’s contribution to modern anthropology since Alison Hingston Quiggin published her memorial ‘sketch’ of Haddon The Head Hunter in 1942. I reinterpret her title in line with Haddon’s adoption of the persona of an English savage in slideshows he performed with the intention of humanising the victims of colonialism and combatting ethnocentric racism. Unlike Quiggin, I had access to ‘lost’ material from the Aran Islands and I use this to re-evaluate Haddon’s work as an ethnologist in Ireland, a topic usually regarded as irrelevant in the historiography of disciplinary anthropology.
I argue that Haddon, the grandson of anti-slavery activists whose daughters were socialists and feminists, set out to revolutionise anthropology in the 1890s in association with a network of anarcho-utopian activists and philosophers. The result is a painstaking reconstruction of a culture war that divided Anglo-Irish anthropology in the 1890s. That war has been ‘forgotten’ by disciplinary historians who focussed instead on evolutionary science bracketed by race and colonialism. However, it is being replayed in the current stand-off between a humanitarian tradition of engaged anthropology and an academic discipline of political utility that became controversial in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. In short, Haddon’s long battle with a liberal academy provides an interesting perspective on attempts by academics to reposition anthropology within a neoliberal academy.
A Very English Savageis also a book about photography and it pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. I argue that this led to an experiment in cinematography in the Torres Strait in 1898 and, given his radically anticolonial attitude and subversive intent, these four minutes of film stand as a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology. I also argue against that Haddon’s slideshows about the Aran Islands were a form of anticolonial activism that provided an ethnographic baseline for cultural nationalists like Hyde and literary modernists like Synge. Academic publishing severely limits the scope for photography as an alternative to text and this aspect of Haddon’s work was explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, an exhibition of twenty five photographs at the RoyalAnthropological Institute in London.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savageis available atBooks Upstairs | Dublin’s Oldest Independent Bookshop.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savagehas gone on sale on the Berghahn website with a time-limited discount of 25% available with the code WALS9840.
‘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.
The opening of a grave in a community burial ground marks the end of a ten-year campaign seeking the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls’ of Inishbofin. Community representatives will remove the remains of their ancestors from the ‘Old‘ Anatomy Dept at Trinity College, University of Dublin at 11am on Wednesday 12 July and, following a funeral service at noon in the college chapel, will begin the journey home. The burial will take place at 1pm on Sunday 16 July.
Archaeological excavation at St Colman’s Monastery on Inishbofin in preparation for the return and burial of ancestral remains stolen in 1890 and held in the Anatomy Dept TCD since 1892 (photo: Marie Coyne)
The opening of a grave in a community burial ground marks the end of a ten-year campaign seeking the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls’ of Inishbofin. Community representatives will remove the remains of their ancestors from the ‘Old‘ Anatomy Dept at Trinity College, University of Dublin at 11am on Wednesday 12 July and, following a funeral service at noon in the college chapel, will begin the journey home. The burial will take place at 1pm on Sunday 16 July. See www.inishbofin.com for details.
Christopher Day (top) making the coffin in the same way that his great grand uncle James Cunnane (bottom) made coffins in Inishbofin in the 1960’s (photos: Marie Coyne).
This is the first repatriation project of its kind in Ireland and is probably the most important anthropological event since the Harvard Anthropological Mission to the Irish Free State in the 1930s. To begin with, the story of the ‘stolen skulls of Inishbofin’ captured the public imagination in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter Movement and generated extensive media interest in the history of anthropology in Ireland. Furthermore, the controversy triggered a critical engagement with the idea of anthropology at a community level and this will have a major impact on how institutions deal with communities in relation to colonial legacies. For instance, the Colonial Legacies Review Working Group at TCD contested the use of ‘repatriation’ to denote ‘return and burial’ because, ironically, of its unwelcome colonial connotations in an Irish context. The debate that followed clarified important aspects of the legislation governing the retention of human remains, not least (a) the distinction between archaeological and ethnological collections from the colonial era and (b) the automatic right of return for burial in the case of the latter. The controversy also raised serious questions about the ‘evidence based’ methodology employed by the Colonial Legacies Review Working Group, which ultimately had to concede the unconditional right of communities in Inishbofin, Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay to have ancestral remains returned for burial.
The Inishbofin remains will be buried as close as possible to St Colman’s Monastery, where they rested until Haddon and Dixon stole them in 1890. The site was chosen because of the low risk of disturbing earlier, unmarked burials – the source of the remains – or any settlement associated with the monastery. Nevertheless, archaeologist Franc Miles from Archaeology and Built Heritage supervised the opening of the grave by Ryan Lash, John Burke, John Cunnane, John Michael Coyne, Ryan Coyne and Máirtín Lavelle.
Marie Coyne documented the process in the following slideshow.
