The lost world of the Galway hooker

The photographer Henri Cartier- Bresson once said that the photograph itself did not interest him: he only wanted to capture a minute part of reality. Photography was, in his view, not the endless consumption of images that new technology allows for but “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event”. For photographers dealt in things that are continually vanishing, he said, and “when they have vanished there is no contrivance on Earth which can make them come back again”.

The photographer and, now, documentary-maker Joe St Leger agrees. “We cannot develop and print a memory,” he says. When St Leger made his first trip to a regatta in Kinvara, Co Galway, about 30 years ago, he began collecting material that was to prove Cartier-Bresson right.

St Leger, who won many awards during his time working for The Irish Times and the Irish Press, had managed to persuade his picture desk to send him to Cruinniú na mBád, the annual gathering of Galway hookers.

“It was 1982, and the movement to revive interest in the traditional work boats was just three years going,” St Leger says.

Tony Moylan, Cruinniú's founder, planned the August gathering in 1979 to celebrate the coastal connection with the craft, with their familiar "tumble-home" hulls.

Designed for fishing herring around Galway Bay, the timber freight boats, built from oak frames with a thick beech keel, became the freight trucks of the 19th century. They sailed between Connemara, Kinvara and the Aran Islands with turf in exchange for livestock, corn, barley, lime and timber.

Although roads had replaced the sea highway along the west coast by the second World War, the hookers continued deliveries to the Aran Islands until the advent of gas – or “cosy gas”, as the Kosangas cylinders were known – and electricity.

By the time Moylan initiated the revival some of the craft were already languishing at quays, and the skills of the builders – the Caseys, Clohertys and Mulkerrins at Mweenish, and the Brannellys and Keanes in Kinvara – were in danger of being lost.

Moylan's foresight, and that of fellow organisers and sailors such as Dr Michael Brogan, ensured that Kinvara's association with the builders and families who sailed the boats for generations would continue.

St Leger met and became friends with the O'Briens, Baileys, McDonaghs, Jennings and Joyces, as he returned each year to photograph the regatta. A favourite photograph is of the late Johnny Bailey and his brother Pádraig on their boat, the Capall.

A dinghy sailor himself, the photographer came to recognise the subtleties, strengths and distinct features of the different designs: the bád mór, leathbhád, gleoiteog and pucán.

St Leger shot all his images on 35mm black-and-white film. Fortunately, he also brought a 16mm Bolex camera belonging to his father, the RTÉ cameraman Bill St Leger.

The result is a documentary voyage with St Leger as navigator. The film opens with St Leger in a darkroom at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin, where he is captured immersing film in a tank of liquid developer to bring up a negative image and then transferring it to a tank of fixer solution.

It’s less than two decades since St Leger, and so many of his peers, worked with skilled darkroom staff under small orange safelights. Very few of these creative sanctuaries survive, and digital developments allow everyone to be a photographer – even if it’s not, perhaps, with the eye of artists such as St Leger. As he acknowledges, digital photography has ensured that “the darkroom has gone the way of hooker men”.

Bádóirí: Photographing the Last of the Galway Hooker Men is on RTÉ One on Monday, May 23rd, at 7.30pm