Meet the people of Dublin

Father Browne’s Dublin Photographs 1925-1950

edited by E. E. O’Donnell SJ

(Messenger Publications, €14.99)

Here is a book, the latest from the Fr Browne archive, in which the famous Jesuit photographer focuses on the first years of independence in Dublin, and the transition from the Irish Free State to the Republic of Ireland. 

These are not just images to be flicked through. There are important revelations not of history as the framers of legislation which led to the country’s changes of title, but of life as it was actually lived, the stuff of everyday existence to which historians so often pay little attention, their eyes fixed on the ever-evolving machinations of politicians. Here for once we meet the people.

Images of reality

Historians trained to deal with texts are often ill at ease with photographs. They are often taken as images of reality, when in fact they are selected moments of process. Photographs need to be read with all the care that is given to a memoir or self-serving confession. 

Here, for instance, in the images of Dublin we can see a pedestrianised city: cars are still little used, bicycles dominate the streets. There is an image of a horse drawing a dray collapsed in O’Connell Street. There are images of the Eucharistic Congress, which have become more familiar, but there are also images of the inner city, such as a burst water main in Summerhill. Contrast this with the image of the Governor-General Tim Healy at garden party in his residence at the Phoenix Park. (At dinners there he was accustomed to toast the King formally, a touch which must have aggrieved some of his guests.) 

One is struck by how young some of people at work are, often little more than 14, yet out in the world selling newspapers or serving in Linden Convalescent Home. 

But what do the photographs not show? 1920s Dublin was jazz age Dublin, 1930s Dublin Hollywood Dublin: there are no images of dances halls, dress-dances in the Metropole or Clerys, queues for the latest films at the Savoy or the Carlton. There are no images of war-damaged Dublin in the early 1940s, a city victimised by German bombers just to remind us of what war might really mean. There are certainly images of slums and inner city poverty, but contrast them with Walker Evans or Bill Brandt, contemporary figures in America or England. 

Fr Browne’s photographs are important, a national treasure of the first order.  But he has a progressive view of Ireland, an optimistic one. 

Here we certainly meet the people, and are glad to do so. But we do not see all often, there were certainly aspects of modern life to which Fr Browne’s (on the evidence of the albums so far) was blind. But then, like all artists, he was expressing his vision, not yours or mine. 

There are no interiors, for instance, of a one-room home in Parnell street, no images of the middle class in Foxrock sitting down to dinner. But what we do have is important. 

We still do not know what secrets are hidden in the over 42,000 surviving negatives, which go beyond the pleasant and the quaint. 

These images need not just to be admired they need to be studied, to be treated as art rather than record. And that great task has hardly begun.