Fitzpatrick, Fergal
(2019)
The
Politics
of
the
Image:
Ireland,
Landscape
and
Nineteenth-‐Century
Photography.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
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.
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