A book featuring photographs Alen MacWeeney took at Traveller camps in the 1960s reveals a lost world, writes Belinda McKeon
It was a vast, junk-strewn field facing onto the Fever Hospital - piebald ponies and barrel-topped wagons, and everywhere, the charred and crumbling remains of small fires. Moon-faced children with filthy limbs and scraggy hair and games of chase and ring-a-rosy. It was a patchwork of scrap iron and painted wood and corrugated metal, and smoke rising high in the air, and dogs wandering, and women carrying chubby babies and pails of water. The men were garrulous and watchful and weathered, and when Alen MacWeeney first stepped through a hedge onto the Traveller camp at Cherry Orchard in 1965, they met him with no great sign of surprise.
They welcomed him, although MacWeeney was not one of them, was very definitely an outsider - a young photographer, recently returned from New York, where he had moved at the age of 21 to become an assistant to Richard Avedon. Avedon, even then, was all about models and celebrities and film stars, and it had been a whirlwind couple of years, an eye-opener for a self-taught photographer who had begun his career, at 16, as the tea boy at The Irish Times. But now, walking with a Traveller man named Joe Donoghue across the scorched grass and the wet rubble of Cherry Orchard, listening to the first of the stories and seeing the first of the faces that would lay claim to his lens and his tape recorder for the next five years (in the camp at Cherry Orchard and elsewhere), MacWeeney realised that his eyes had hardly been open at all. This was another world, and his immersion in it was to change his sense of his own world completely. In these camps, on and off, he would spend the next five years.
Young as he was, MacWeeney was conscious from the beginning of his time on the Traveller camps of the dangers of romanticism; the people he met there struck him, from the first day, as the doubles of the migrant farmers in Walter Evans's photographs of the American Depression. And just as Evans had been left in no doubt about the poverty and the hardship faced by the tenant families he photographed, so MacWeeney could not ignore the dire living conditions of the camps in Ballyfermot.
The barrel wagons and huts were hardly comfortable homes, but even they were a luxury compared to the bag tents in which some Travellers lived - filthy sheets of canvas thrown onto scrap-metal frames, hunched over straw bedding on which whole families might have to sleep at night. Child mortality rates were high, and the lives of the Traveller women in particular were punishing.
But still there was to this world, he found, an immense dignity, a strangeness and a sovereignty that he found beautiful. In his photographs, collected now in a book published by New England College Press, that beauty is caught in all its rawness and defiance. By bringing a tape recorder to countless evenings of storytelling and music, MacWeeney unwittingly became one of the most important anthropologists of Traveller culture - his recordings now make up the largest collection of Traveller material at the folklore archives in UCD, and among them are the early sessions of the young Furey brothers, recorded at their home in Ballyfermot. But the photographs are intensely valuable too; their long gaze into this lost world is startling in the details revealed, haunting in the affection and the frankness with which it captures these faces, these families, these lives.
MACWEENEY HAS BEEN based in New York for most of his career. He has published five books of photography and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum. An exhibition at the Kasher Gallery in Manhattan earlier this year showcased the Traveller photographs. But the road to publication for these photographs has been a long one, and frustration hangs around it even now for MacWeeney, because no Irish publisher has been willing to take it on, even with the offer of co-funding from the American side.
"'We don't like Travellers very much, they're not liked here' - that's what one publisher in Dublin said to me," MacWeeney recalls.
The American edition of the book is stocked by a small number of Irish bookshops, so readers here can still enjoy it despite the caution of publishers here. Its images are extraordinary - as are the marvellously colloquial stories and songs transcribed in its pages and collected on its accompanying CD - and as MacWeeney looks through it now, snatches of story, funny and strange and sometimes poignant, emerge about its cast of characters.
"They were so resourceful," he says, thinking back again to those who gave him fireside company in the camp. "They lived with very little relationship to what we understand as money and as time, without any knowledge of what it was going to be tomorrow." They woke him up, he says. He misses them.
When he returned to Ireland in 1997 to make a documentary inspired by the Cherry Orchard and Labre Park photographs, he found the welcome much less warm and the people much more "embattled", but he was determined to find out what had become of the people he had known. Many had settled, and some had died, but he got accounts of all of them - except for one. The girl on the cover of the book, the girl holding a strip of cellophane to her face, masking herself, teasing the camera, was known to nobody.
Nobody could see her face, so nobody remembered her name. The black and white world had faded. But the photographs bore witness to all that had been.
Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More is published by New England College Press, $60. www.alenmacweeney.com