The Politics of the Image: Ireland, Landscape and Nineteenth-­‐Century Photography
This thesis examines the politics inherent in photographic imaging of place and space in nineteenth-­‐century Ireland. It is a critical-­‐historical analysis of five separate phases of activity between 1842 and 1897 – a period during which politics on the island of Ireland was dramatically transformed, while the evolution of photographic technologies was radical in its shift from slow artisanal processes to mass-­‐market industrialised protocols. The first chapter, ‘The Military Observer’, considers a number of Calotype images, made by Captain Henry Craigie Brewster while he was stationed in County Cork as an army officer during the winter and spring of 1842-­‐43. They remain the earliest known surviving Irish photographs, produced within a visual regime where the instability of colonial power is manifest in tentative images of territory. Chapter Two, ‘The Invisible Famine’, analyses the implications that unfold from the absence of Famine photographs, drawing attention to a crisis in the field of visual representation produced by encounters with disaster. In the following section, ‘Big House Photography: Space, Place and Modernity’, the position of photography emanating from Anglo-­‐Irish society in mid-­‐century is considered from a perspective that seeks to expand the limited readings afforded up to now, and suggests new accounts of images that have often been presented as narrow signifiers of social privilege. The penultimate chapter, ‘Visualising the Rise and Fall of New Tipperary’, is focused on how contending photographic languages mediated one of the key battlegrounds in the Plan of Campaign’s conflict with a government-­‐backed syndicate of landlords in 1889-­‐90. The uses to which the images were put demonstrate how photographs became more deeply enmeshed in mediatised political narratives during the late-­‐ nineteenth century. The final section, ‘Imaging and Imagining Eviction’, critically examines Maud Gonne’s 1897 appropriation of eviction images for a political street protest during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and offers a partially speculative reading of the moment that addresses the conceptual unmooring of photographs from authorship and historically at the turn of the twentieth century.
National University of Ireland - Maynooth
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