A film tracing the visit of the documentary photographer Dorothea Lange to Ireland in 1954 has just been made, mostly in Clare. Lange, one of the foremost photographers of her time, best known for her pictures of America's Great Depression, came to Ireland in 1954 on an assignment for Life magazine.
She spent several weeks here, during which time she took 2,400 photographs, mainly in Clare, featuring people at work and leisure. They offer a glimpse of an Ireland which no longer exists.
Among Lange's subjects was eight-year-old Bridie Flanagan from the parish of Inagh. Bridie Flanagan, now Power, never saw that photo of herself and two of her friends, both of whom subsequently emigrated to America, until two years ago, when it was included in a selection of photographs published in a book called Dorothea Lange's Ireland.
That book was the brainchild of Dubliner Gerry Mullins, who lives in San Francisco and who discovered Lange's Irish photographs in the Oakland Museum of California four years ago.
Now Gerry and his co-producer, Deirdre Lynch, are making a documentary about Lange's visit to this country, the people she photographed and their subsequent lives. They have just finished filming and have returned to San Francisco, where the documentary is now being edited.
Gerry, who freelances for the San Francisco Gael, first heard about the pictures when he attended a Dorothea Lange retrospective exhibition four years ago. "I was looking for an Irish angle and there wasn't much there, but the curator told me that Lange had been to Ireland in the 1950s". The pictures from that trip were in the Oakland Museum. "I went there expecting a few pictures and discovered 2,400," Gerry recalls. Life magazine had used 19 of the pictures, the remainder had never been published. Gerry explored the collection over several months. The fruits of this labour was Dorothea Lange's Ireland.
He made contact with numerous people in Clare, including Bridie Power, in an effort to identify the subjects of the photographs. Lange had never captioned them, so identifying the people involved retracing the photographer's footsteps.
"I got some information from the images used in Life because they had been captioned. In other cases it was a question of finding visual clues in the picture which helped identify an area, such as a signpost." When the book was finished, he realised there was another story to be told, namely what happened in these people's lives since 1954. Gerry's research for both book and documentary yielded some intriguing stories. One young girl photographed by Lange died the following year of appendicitis and her family were totally unaware that this picture of her existed. "The documentary is about putting the camera on people and finding out what's happened to their lives since. What's come through is how individual people's lives have changed in 44 years and also how much Ireland has changed in that time. You can see that even by comparing the lanes of Ennis today with those in Lange's pictures."
For Bridie Power, being involved in this documentary has brought back many memories. "I remember when she came to Inagh school, the master didn't want us photographed, so he was telling us to run along and not be making a show of ourselves. We were delighted to be getting our picture taken. I never expected to see the actual photo, though."
Her opinion of the changes in Ireland over the last 40 years is very straightforward. "We've gone ahead in leaps and bounds".