Ireland Photography

The Irish: A Photohistory 1840-1940 The first Irish photographs date from 1840, a year after Louis Daguerre announced to the world his discovery of the photographic process. In the century that followed, Irish political life was dominated by the struggle for land rights, for Home Rule and finally for independence. Ireland was to know tragedy and triumph, bitter struggle and agonized compromise. Much of that experience, now so remote, is brought to life here in images. Yet these photographs, which cover the first century of Ireland in the era of photography, do more than tell the political story. They give a wider insight into a people, a landscape and a lost way of life. They capture the sheer hard labour of rural survival: cutting peat for fuel, gathering seaweed, fishing and tilling the soil, against the often harsh Irish landscape.

The Most Beautiful Villages of Ireland This work presents images and impressions of numerous villages in Ireland which as well as being beautiful are working, living communities. The book follows the divisions of ancient provinces - Ulster, Leinster, Connacht, and Muster - and uncovers various rural beauty spots - some well-known, others less so. Places featured include the coastal villages of Cork, Ardagh in County Longford - where Oliver Goldsmith was inspired to write "She Stoops to Conquer", Roscommon and Galway, in Connacht and the villages of Donegal. This visual and verbal record to Irish villages also contains a guide to various sites of interest, markets, hotels, and restaurants. Ireland Photography.

"Magnum" Ireland This is a collection of photographs of the beautiful and complex land of Ireland, by some of the greatest names at Magnum, the leading photographic agency of modern times. Ireland Photography.

Ireland: On the Edge of Europe Agnes Pataux has travelled extensively throughout Ireland, photographing its ancient, majestic, nature-dominated landscapes. Her photographs, intense and solitary, speak to us of the primordial forces of nature, forces that have shaped both the extraordinary natural environs and the psyche of an enduring people, the Irish. Pataux is bound to particular sites, attracted by geological formations and manmade phenomena: the famine walls of the 1840s; the rugged Burren coast, blanketed in grey limestone, crisscrossed by splits and cracks that form a haunting geometry; Connemara with its wild and desolate bogs; County Antrim where nature has created the monolithic, hexagonal-shaped stone pavements of the mythological Giant's Causeway; and the coasts of the Aran Islands with their high cliffs beaten and broken by endless waves. Finally, the portraits of the men of these Emerald Islands show a people profoundly marked by their environment, one that has shaped the people, the one that the people in turn have shaped. All remain as indelible traces of an ancient past. These powerful images that have captured the mind and soul of Agnes Pataux are presented here through eighty stunning duotone photographs. The text, by novelist and critic Colm Toibin, introduces the reader to the outstanding landscapes of Ireland through literary evocations.

All Changed: Fifty Years of Photographing Ireland The past fifty years have been a time of immense change in Ireland, as the country has moved from a traditional to a modern society. The introduction of electricity, the quiet revolution, was accompanied by changes in attitudes to Church, sex, relationships, property, emigration, to life in general. In that short time people have absorbed massive change, often enthusiastically, though perhaps with the occasional pang of regret for the old ways. Here we see the faces, the landscapes and the life of that recently disappeared Ireland, Jack Lynch, JFK, Grace Kelly, Dev, de Gaulle, the Troubles, folk traditions, alongside the new faces and the new styles of our modern society.

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