photography

photography was pioneered in Ireland by a Belfast engraver, Francis Beatty, who announced in the Northern Whig on 6 August 1840 that he had made a ‘photogenic drawing’, or ‘calotype’, of Belfast's Long Bridge. This process, published in England in late 1839 and later patented as the ‘Talbotype’, used a paper negative to produce a positive image on paper. A few months earlier Louis Daguerre in Paris had unveiled the daguerrotype process, which fixed a positive image onto a polished metal plate. The first commercial studio in Ireland opened in Dublin in October 1841; a year later, Beatty's daguerrotypes became the first professionally shot photographs produced in Belfast.

Although the patents which protected these techniques did not apply in Ireland (allowing Irish itinerant photographers to practise illicitly in England), a number of Dublin daguerrotype studios were set up under licence by Richard Beard, a London coal merchant who had bought the concession for England and Wales and engaged Beatty as his European operative. The most long‐lived of these was Professor Leon Gluckman's ‘Daguerrotype Portrait Institution’ in Lower Sackville Street, Dublin, thought to have been responsible for the series of portraits, of doubtful veracity, of imprisoned Young Irelanders.

The invention in 1851 of the faster, simpler, and unpatented wet collodion or wet plate process by Frederick Scott Archer effectively made both the daguerrotype and Talbotype obsolete, and opened up photography to increasing numbers of professional and amateur photographers. By the end of the decade 60 new studios had opened in Dublin, 24 of which were in Grafton Street alone. Belfast lagged behind but still managed to more than double its complement during the same period from 6 to 12. This commercial expansion was largely due to the growing popularity of portrait photography, especially after the availability from 1861 of the carte‐de‐visite: small photographs the size and shape of visiting cards, mounted on stiff card and varnished, used both for personal portrait sittings and as collectible sets of images of local and national personalities. Commercial landscape photography also had its beginnings in these decades, with firms offering prints of scenery, mansions, and ruins, often as fashionable stereoscopic views, small twin images taken with a double‐lensed camera and viewed through a stereoscope to give an impression of depth. One of the key producers and importers of these images was John Fortune Lawrence; his trade was taken over by his brother William, who established what was to become Dublin's most successful photographic firm in his mother's Sackville Street toyshop in 1865.

The wet collodion process brought recreational photography to the gentry and aristocracy, with the novelty of the pursuit allowing women such as Mary, countess of Rosse, of Birr Castle, the first woman member of the Dublin Photographic Society (established 1854), and Lady Augusta Crofton of Clonbrock House to make important aesthetic and technical contributions. The invention of a successful dry plate process by Richard Leach Maddox in 1878 did away with the need to transport darkroom and chemicals to the scene of action and paved the way for the true popularization of the medium. In America George Eastman began working on the production of film negatives, introducing in 1885 a roll holder which could be fitted on standard plate cameras and in 1888 (under the slogan ‘you press the button we do the rest’) the first ‘Kodak’ box camera. Capable of taking 100 circular pictures which were returned to the makers for processing, this sold in its thousands in Ireland for £5 each. In 1892 John Joly, professor of biology at Trinity College and a member of the Photographic Society of Ireland, produced the world's first practical colour photograph.

The new transportability of dry plate equipment paved the way for the photographing of Ireland by image makers such as Robert French, chief photographer to William Lawrence, who travelled all over the country photographing its towns and villages for publication as postcards and printed views, and was responsible for most of the 40,000 views now preserved as the Lawrence collection in the National Library of Ireland. In Ulster near contemporaries were R. J. Welch (1859–1936) and his equally well‐known assistant W. A. Green (1870–1958), followed somewhat later by A. R. Hogg (1869–1939).

The bulk of material in the major historic Irish photographic collections dates from c.1880 onwards. Whilst genre images dominate, the introduction of hand‐held cameras during the 1890s encouraged documentary photography and the production of visual narratives of political events such as the labour disputes of 1907 and 1913, the home rule crisis, the Anglo‐Irish War, and the Irish Civil War. Populated images of commerce and industry become more common in the 20th century, with many large Irish firms, such as Harland & Wolff, commissioning official photographers. At the same time, photography became more widely used in advertising and promotion and, of particular importance, in journalism.

Vivienne Pollock