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ANDREW WARD FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHS
Alen MacWeeney: Irish Travellers
Tinkers No More
Introduction by Bairbre Ni Fhloinn.
For over five years, Dublin-born Alen MacWeeney (born 1939) photographed the native itinerants of Ireland known as Travellers, spending countless evenings in their caravans and by their campfires, drinking tea and listening to their tales, songs and music. In a memoir of this period, the photographer describes his attraction to the lifestyle of his companions: “Theirs was a bigger way of life than mine, with its daily struggle for survival, compared to my struggle to find images symbolic and representative of that life.” With Irish Travellers, MacWeeney has crafted a profoundly beautiful record of a slowly vanishing way of life rarely seen by outsiders, let alone captured by a camera. Author and winner of the Man Booker prize John Banville compared Irish Travellers to “Edward Curtis's masterly recuperation of the American Indian.” Alen MacWeeney's photographs are essential records of a vanishing culture.
Featured image, Alen MacWeeney's Turning over a car, Cherry Orchard is reproduced from Irish Travellers, in which MacWeeney writes, "Cherry Orchard was a big, rough field. Bushes ran along the sides of what were really three adjoining fields, divided by more bushes and facing the pebble-dashed wall of Cherry Orchard Fever Hospital. Children played in muck and rubble that looked like the aftermath of a battle in the midst of which were a dozen or more caravans, sheds, bag tents, cars, carts, and refuse of all sorts. Horses were tethered with ragged ropes to heavy stones or old iron bed frames, dogs cautiously skulked about, and pups yelped at the piebald ponies as they grazed or were being harnessed or ridden around the camp by children."
"The people were naked to my eyes in the way they let me in. Theirs was a bigger life than mine, with its daily struggle for survival, compared to my struggle to find images symbolic and representative of that life. I was aware of t he appeal of poverty to a camera; especially when dressed up with romantic notions of horses, caravans, and campfires, it makes more gripping photographs than comfort could ever provide. But that was not what held me. I felt a need to show the world (or at least Dublin) what it had dismissed and overlooked: a dignity, a raw beauty, a deep uncertainty, and perhaps a stripped down Irishness in the rough-and-tumble existences laid bare before me. Over the next five years I became lost in their lives, in their talk, in their stories and songs, and another path opened before me. The underworld I entered then--and that's what it was--I kept a secret. As my relationship with the Travellers grew, I valued more and more the private world to which I'd been given entry and which I felt was mine to protect."
FORMAT: Pbk, 9.5 x 11.25 in. / 128 pgs / 1 color / 61 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $39.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $50 ISBN: 9780615415024 PUBLISHER: Andrew Ward Fine Art Photographs AVAILABLE: 7/1/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: *not available
Published by Andrew Ward Fine Art Photographs. Introduction by Bairbre Ni Fhloinn.
For over five years, Dublin-born Alen MacWeeney (born 1939) photographed the native itinerants of Ireland known as Travellers, spending countless evenings in their caravans and by their campfires, drinking tea and listening to their tales, songs and music. In a memoir of this period, the photographer describes his attraction to the lifestyle of his companions: “Theirs was a bigger way of life than mine, with its daily struggle for survival, compared to my struggle to find images symbolic and representative of that life.” With Irish Travellers, MacWeeney has crafted a profoundly beautiful record of a slowly vanishing way of life rarely seen by outsiders, let alone captured by a camera. Author and winner of the Man Booker prize John Banville compared Irish Travellers to “Edward Curtis's masterly recuperation of the American Indian.” Alen MacWeeney's photographs are essential records of a vanishing culture.
