Which of these photographs shows the real Ireland?

THE IMAGE THAT opens Justin Carville's new book, Photography and Ireland, is both instantly familiar and blatantly fantastic. Two children with flaming red hair load turf on to the back of a donkey in a Connemara bog. The landscape around them is drenched in colours saturated far beyond the point of any naturalistic possibility.

This famous image is technically the creation of the English photographer and populist John Hinde – a nonpareil weaver of lurid tourist dreams – but also, in a wider sense, the product of decades of photographic representations of Ireland as both a real and an imagined geographical space.

It’s an image that represents one of the “two poles of Ireland’s photographic culture”, Carville says. At one end we have these dreamlike, colour-saturated visions of Ireland as a pastoral idyll. At the opposite end are, Carville says, the “grainy, monochromatic hues of the photojournalistic depictions of urban streets strewn with the detritus of sectarian conflict”.

While addressing the potency of these representations, Carville’s book attempts to offer a cultural history of photography that also looks between these poles.

Aside from picturesque representations of landscape, an appetite for images of “Irish types” has been a fundamental part of photography here. In the late Victorian and Edwardian era there existed, the book suggests, a keen market and appetite for carte-de-visite photographs of “particular peasant types such as the ‘Irish Fisherman’, the ‘Spinning Woman’ and the ‘Colleen’ ”. These made Ireland look thrillingly wild and pre-industrial – and, according to Carville, showed a desire to capture a vanishing country. “There’s this sense,” he says, “both historically and today, of an Ireland that’s constantly disappearing. It was vanishing at the turn of the 19th century and it’s still vanishing at the beginning of the 21st.”

Some photographers can therefore be anxious to record a way of life forever on the verge of extinction, he argues. This motivation drove, for example, John Millington Synge’s photographs of Aran Islanders in the late 19th century, and it still informs foreign photographers’ images of Ireland and Irishness. They “often have the best intentions of photographing Ireland in different ways,” Carville says, “but they can fall back on those familiar notions of Ireland and Irish identity, on the idea that modernity is somehow corrupting Irish society and that it’s going to disappear and we somehow need to salvage that before it evaporates.” In a multicultural Ireland, Carville says, such photographs “can no longer be seen as representative of Irish identity”.

WHILE CONCERNS ABOUT the disappearance of an authentic Ireland may linger, one of Irish history's key traumas has, photographically at least, always been absent. The Great Famine was documented visually, in engravings published in the Illustrated London News,for example, but there is no direct photographic record. As cameras first became available here in 1839, was there a deliberate, politically motivated avoidance of a troubling reality?

“It can be quite easy to make the claim that since most of the people who had cameras in that period were landlords, and since the decimation caused by the Famine was happening within their lands, they had a vested interest in not photographing it,” Carville says. “But you have to remember that during that period the aesthetic interests in photography were centred on things like landscape and trying to make photographs overtly artistic.”

Carville is drawn to photograph traces of the Famine. “In photojournalism, we want to see the action, the event,” Carville says. “But what interests me is not so much the Famine itself but the aftermath of the Famine. The aftermath actually marks the landscape more than anything else. It makes it a global thing. If someone is photographing, say, Irish migrants arriving in the US in the late 19th century, that migration is an effect of the Famine. So I’m interested not so much in what a photograph shows but in what it doesn’t show.”

The inescapable imagery of the Troubles is another example. Dramatic photographs of sectarian violence became the norm. Carville switches the focus to photographs that instead try to capture the everyday traces of conflict. In the work of Mike Abrahams and Paul Seawright, among others, he sees a laudable attempt to articulate the complexities of the Troubles through what he calls “late photographs”, oblique, calmer compositions that invite more reflective responses.

The book ends with deliberately banal images of urban and suburban modernity, where nature interacts with the concrete sprawl of recent development. Given the collapse of the Celtic Tiger dream, and how that has rendered bullishly confident images of Irish progress problematic, what kind of response would Carville like to see? “A lot of the photographic work produced during the Celtic Tiger years was about empty spaces,” he says. “But the stories that need to be told now are stories of the people themselves. It’s no longer possible for photography to be about just spaces.”

Photography and Irelandby Justin Carville is published by Reaktion Books, £17.95

'Disappeared' and disappearing: Justin's Carville's alternative Ireland

DAVID FARRELL Oristown (Graffiti)From the series Innocent Landscapes (2000)

“The image is from a series that documented the search sites of the ‘disappeared’ in post-conflict Northern Ireland. I think what’s significant about it is the combination of the shocking text written on the road, with the word “Bodies” underlined, and this quite familiar landscape at dawn. The sun is rising and it’s a rural, quiet space, but it has the resonance of something quite horrific and horrible that’s taken place. It conveys that nefarious aspect of the space.”

JIM VAUGHAN UntitledFrom the series This Time, This Place, 2006

“There has been this tradition of photographers going in and photographing a disappearing culture. What interested me about this particular work, taken on Clare Island, is that everything is quite subdued. The colours are quite muted. It doesn’t have that bright, vibrant representation of the landscape. And there’s a deliberate attempt to eschew those sort of compositional conventions of the picturesque landscape. You have a representation of the humdrum of everyday life of the island. This is a place that is their home. And it’s not presented as an exotic space, or a foreign space, or a romantic space. Clearly in this image they have their own sense of modernity on the island, and certainly don’t have a sense of themselves as being exotic.”

DARA McGRATH N6/M50 Liffey ValleyFrom the series By the Way, 2003

“McGrath took his By the Way series during the Celtic Tiger era. It’s a photograph of this reshaping and re-forming of the suburban landscape. There’s a strange combination of harsh forms of street furniture – the street lamp and the railings in ubiquitous steel – combined with the rolling softness of the plantation and the foreign ecology of the palm tree. In some ways it has that resonance that it could be anywhere. It could be California.”