It was always at Christmas when we would arrive in my grandfather’s house that I looked at the pictures. He had taken and developed thousands of photographs, all of which had been meticulously mounted in heavy photography albums. It was the smell of them that was most distinctive and that still pervades any room which they occupy all these years later.
Why were we all so compelled to pore over these images? There were many people in them whom we had never met and places we had never been to but what was captured was people’s animation. It was as though at any moment they would come to life and continue their conversation, hop on a bus or pull up their children’s socks.
My grandfather managed to capture the entire life, pace and character of a city and made us all wonder about these random collections of people. What was their story, where were they going and who were they with? It has taken 50 years for us to get the answers to some of these questions. So in a way this book was part curiosity, part admiration for his skills, a sharing of this great social document and then some detective work.
Although one of my grandfather’s ambitions was to capture and record the people of Cork in their native city, he never exhibited or published any of the photographs during his lifetime. In a way this has made the collection all the more interesting as it embodies a very particular time in Irish life. I always felt that these people could as easily be in Kilkenny, Perugia or even Russia. There was something very different about how people behaved then, no matter where in the world they were. It was the essence of this behaviour that my grandfather illustrated so beautifully in his photographs and which I have chosen to represent that time.
Society is constantly in a state of flux but on occasions it appears to take a giant leap before it settles back into a more modulated pace. In some of the photographs from the Sixties there was this amazing juxtaposition between the headscaved and gloved older women and their beehive, miniskirt-wearing daughters. It is as thought the mantle of influence had passed directly from Queen Victoria to Vidal Sasoon. These were the images that fascinated me most, this great gap in how people dressed and persumably behaved. It made me wonder if there were conflicts within families over such differing sensibilities.
Somehow by the Seventies and later it’s as if the older generation caught up and looked or dressed more like the younger people. During the Seventies everyone seems to have started wearing bought clothes, whereas in the Sixties there are still so many people wearing clothes that were handmade. Beautifully turned out children in sparkling white ankle socks (when there weren’t even washing machines). Families often wearing matching hand-knitted cardigans or handmade summer dresses in matching fabrics.
It is both fascinating and refreshing to see neither a trainer nor a mobile phone in sight. This was my next point of interest in choosing these pictures. I wanted to show how different the pace of life was. It is interesting that my grandfather managed to capture the idea of pace and movement in something as static as a photograph but it is one of the stories he told best.
His eye for this story is perfectly illustrated in the very smartly dressed woman, who is not rushing anywhere but instead stops in the middle of the street to read her newspaper, she looks perfectly relaxed and at her leisure. There is a man smoking his pipe as he watches the world go by. So many people are stopped chatting on the street, so much so that their dogs have lain down to sleep on the footpath. Children are abandoned pell mell ontside various shops, often left minding both younger siblings and shopping. Their parents are not anxious to leave them unattended and the look of bored but patient resignation on the children’s faces provided great subject matter for my grandfather.
There is a wonderful sense of story as many of the subjects are unaware that they are being photographed. This would be impossible now as people all react to a camera and are rarely taken in natural poses. It increases the sense of curiosity that we have about these people because they are in thought, in conversation or quite often in their own world in a bus queue.
Which brings me to the detective element of this book. As we never knew who any of these people were - nor did my grandfather - it was always going to be interesting to see if people would emerge, 50 years later to add an extra piece to this jigsaw. It is with amazement that subjects describe flicking through the book in a shop and finding themselves on the pages – as young children, with their siblings or parents, wearing their favourite coat or a dress their mother made for them. We are collecting all this information and I feel that I can finally complete the wonderful social record that my grandfather set out to make all those years ago.
Cork in the 1960s by Anthony Barry is published by Mercier Press, priced €30
