Snapshot Stories: Visuality, Photography, and the Social History of Ireland, 1922-2000

During the twentieth century, men and women across Ireland picked up cameras, photographing days out at the beach, composing views of Ireland’s cities and countryside, and recording political events as they witnessed them. Indeed, while foreign photographers often still focused on the image of Ireland as bucolic rural landscape, Irish photographers-snapshotter and professional alike-were creating and curating photographs which revealed more complex and diverse images of Ireland. Snapshot Stories explores these stories. Erika Hanna examines a diverse array of photographic sources, including family photograph albums, studio portraits, the work of photography clubs and community photography initiatives, alongside the output of those who took their cameras into the streets to record violence and poverty. The volume shows how Irish men and women used photography in order to explore their sense of self and society and examines how we can use these images to fill in the details of Ireland’s social history. By exploring this rich array of sources, Snapshot Stories asks what it means to see-to look, to gaze, to glance-in modern Ireland, and explores how conflicts regarding vision and visuality have repeatedly been at the centre of Irish life.