The Ritchie-Pickow photographic
archive is one of the most visually striking collections held in the Archives
of the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. The collection features a large
volume of photographic negatives along with tapes of sound recordings. The
photographs were taken and the recordings made by the husband and wife team
George Pickow and Jean Ritchie on visits to Ireland in 1952 and 1953.
George Pickow was born in Los
Angeles, but grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Following art training at the Cooper
Union, he worked in all areas of photographic media, from making training films
for the US navy during the second World War to illustrating children’s books
for Scribner’s and the Oxford University Press. Jean Ritchie, singer, folklorist
and dulcimer player was born in 1922 in Kentucky. She was the youngest of a
family of 14 children, known as The Singing Ritchies. Jean graduated from the
University of Kentucky in 1946 and taught for a time thereafter. George Pickow
and Jean Ritchie married in 1950 and shortly afterwards, in 1952, Ritchie was
awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to enable her to research the origins of her
family’s songs in Great Britain and Ireland.
The couple spent approximately
eighteen months recording folk songs and traditional musicians and taking
photographs around Ireland. The photographs include images of many well-known
uileann pipe players, for example Seamus Ennis, Michael Reagh, the McPeake
trio, Leo Rowsome; vocalists, including Elizabeth Croinin, Sarah Makem and Mary
Toner and story tellers, such as Patcheen Faherty from the Aran Islands.
As well as assisting his wife in
her research, George Pickow assisted Ritchie in the production and illustration
of her many books on the traditional music of the Southern Appalachians, including
the prize-winning Celebration of Life, and The Swapping Song Book (1952), a
volume of songs from her native Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky. Pickow also used the opportunity to do features
on aspects of Irish cultural life including Christmas celebrations with straw
boys and wren boys, life on the Aran Islands, Dublin scenes, the American
Ambassador and his family in Ireland, the story of St Patrick, the development
of Dublin Airport, operations of the Garda Síochána at Dublin Castle, and Irish
sporting activities, such as road bowling, hurling, coursing, hunting and
racing.
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| Image from Ritchie-Pickow Archive |
Photographs were also taken of traditional
Irish crafts, for example spinning, weaving, thatching and crios and sliotar
making. In a video recording made with George and Jean Pickow in the early
1990s regarding their visits to Ireland, George says that these photographic stories
were for the Sunday News in New York.
The photographic archive is
comprised of one hundred and sixty seven sheets of black and white contact
prints with corresponding negatives, numbering one thousand eight hundred and
eighty seven photographs in total. The majority of the photographs were taken
using Kodak safety film and these negatives are unfortunately not numbered so
the sequence cannot be followed. The last ten sheets of photographs were taken
using Eastman 5 6 super XX safety film and Ilford hypersensitive panchromatic
film, these negatives are numbered. There are also one hundred and ninety
prints in two sizes, 19x19 cms and 27x27 cms, of which ninety five are mounted.
The James Hardiman Library was
pleased to be approached by the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College,
Massachusetts, to include some images from the Ritchie- Pickow Collection for
their new exhibition: Rural Ireland – The Inside Story. The exhibition offers “new and unique
evidence about the varied lives of a marginalised population in a changing
Irish Society” and focuses on tenants, farmers, Famine-era Ireland, rural
Ireland, music, dance, marriage customs and continuity and change in Irish
rural life.
In the Irish Times, Fintan
O’Toole has written about how he visited the exhibition at the McMullen Museum
and gave his thoughts
here. O’Toole writes:
“The domestic
sphere can’t be taken for granted: it may be abandoned in mass emigration, an
awareness that haunts even an apparently simple image such as James Brenan’s
News from America (1875). Or it may be invaded and torn asunder as in Harry
Jones Thaddeus’s An Irish Eviction (1889), in which the action is seen from
what should be the private, domestic space inside the cottage. Domesticity in the
Irish context isn’t banal or cosy. It is a struggle for dignity and survival.”
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| Image from Ritchie-Pickow Archive |
“In however
highly qualified a way, the images can be seen as collaborations. As Angela
Bourke points out in a typically incisive essay in the catalogue: “In order to
sketch or paint an Irish rural interior – a private space – the artist had
first to gain the permission and cooperation of the residents. Prosperous
families may have felt honoured by such attention, but poorer people can only
have been persuaded to admit the stranger and to pose for him or her by the
possibility of financial reward. The finished image of an impoverished rural
interior is a record of an economic opportunity, therefore, and probably of an
economic transaction, formal or informal, in which both sides had parts to
play.”
The Ritchie-Pickow archive offers
insights into many of these societal and cultural aspects of rural Ireland in
the mid-twentieth century. The images
cover a number of locations, Dunmanway in County Cork, Dublin, the Aran Islands
and Northern Ireland. They cover a wide variety of activities, ranging from
cultural, sporting as well as traditional farming and fishing technique, to the
more modern activities associated with an Garda Siochana and Aer Lingus in the
Dublin of the early 1950s.
A striking feature of the archive
is its depiction of life on the Aran Islands in the 1950s. Image show scenes of
the rugged and challenging landscape, exterior and interior of cottages, scenes
of domestic and family life, skills such as weaving, sailing and farming and
cultural scenes such as cooking, dancing, praying as well as striking portraits
of people and many other scenes of life for the inhabitants of the Aran
Islands.
In contrast, these images are
contrasted excellently by the hundreds of photographs of scenes from Dublin
City of 1950’s Ireland. The images of Dublin highlight the many wonderful
streetscapes and landmarks such as O’Connell Bridge and Statue, O’Connell
Street, the Ha’penny Bridge, street traders and sellers, Trinity College, Grafton
Street, various shop and business fronts, the American Embassy, the
headquarters of an Garda Siochana and Dublin Airport.
