GOING ONLINE:WILLIAM MERVIN LAWRENCE was one-armed and 25 years old when, on March 20th, 1865, he placed an advertisement in The Irish Timesannouncing that he was setting up a photographic studio opposite the General Post Office in Dublin at 7 Upper Sackville Street. Robert French, who was a year younger than Lawrence and had been an RIC constable for a short time in Glenealy, Co Wicklow, joined the Lawrence studio – first as printer and later as chief photographer.
These two men, one a clear-headed businessman and the other a gifted photographer, amassed a remarkable collection of 40,000 glass plate negatives taken all over Ireland between the years 1870 and 1914. The Lawrence Collection, because of its scope, size and quality of photographs, is the most important Irish photographic collection of 19th century.
The National Library of Ireland has recently established an online service whereby 20,000 photographs from the Lawrence, Poole and Irish Independent collections, covering the years 1870–1954 and held in the National Photographic Archive, can be viewed on their website, www.nli.ie/digital-photographs.aspx. This ongoing digitising of glass plate negatives is an exciting and important development because it helps preserve the original negatives and gives researchers easy access to vast photographic collections.
Sir Benjamin Stone (1838-1914), an industrialist, collector of photographs and Conservative MP for Birmingham wrote: “Every village has a history which might be preserved by means of the camera.” William Lawrence obviously agreed with these sentiments and had Robert French travel to virtually every town and village in Ireland to take photographs.
Many of these photographs were then sold locally as picture postcards in the period 1900 to 1914 when sending postcards was almost as common as sending text messages is today. The photograph of Cannon Street in Kells is a fine example of Robert French’s many streetscapes. His choice of angle, his use of natural light and shadow and the truncated round tower in the background all attest to his skill as a photographer.
The photograph of the two barefooted Co Donegal women displaying their lace-making abilities is another remarkable image. Their home is a typical roped-thatch house, a type of roof which was prevalent along the western seaboard. The photograph of the fish market in Galway with the boat masts in the background is just one of the many fine townscape photographs in the Lawrence collection.
By 1900 nearly every town in Ireland had a small photographic studio. These studios were often in the same building as a chemist, grocery or hardware shop. Some of these photographic studios, however, were larger than others and created very important regional photographic collections. The Wynne photographic studio in Castlebar was one of the most important of these regional studios. Another of these was the family studio of AH Poole in Waterford city, which amassed an amazing 65,000 glass plate negatives between 1884 and 1954. Many of the photographs in this collection were portraits of individuals, couples and families, which were taken in the Poole studio in Waterford. However, the Poole Whole Plate collection of 5,119 images, which has now been digitised by the National Library, is much more varied in its scope and has remarkable images of all aspects of life in the south-east of Ireland over a 70-year period.
The Poole collection is an invaluable resource not just for those studying family history, but also for local historians interested in Waterford city and county and the southeast. The National Photographic Archive also holds 120 order books from the Poole studios that give the name of the client, the date on which the photograph was taken and other information on the subjects which will prove invaluable to researchers.
The camera celebrates its 170th birthday this year. It was in 1839 that William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis M Daguerre went public with their different methods of fixing images created by the light of the sun.
Since then a vast number of photographic images have been created and the camera has gone through many transformations. The digital revolution in the 1990s has transformed photography. With the digitisation of plate glass images we are seeing some of the great benefits of that revolution. We can now, as W B Yeats put it “stare into the face of time”.
Liam Kelly is the author of Photographs and photography in Irish local history (Four Courts Press, 2008) See also www.nli.ie/digital-photographs.aspx