Photography: The question is, what "Ireland" are we looking at?
Two hundred and thirty six photographs, in black and white and colour, taken around the island through five-and-a-half decades, is quite a cache. But can 34 Magnum Agency photographers really describe the place any of us grew up in - or Celtic Tigerland, or Northern Ireland? And even if they are saying something about the way we lived then, does any one of us want to be tagged and labelled quite so easily into "The Irish" - whether poor, rich, rural, urban, at play, at prayer or at war?
In fact, many of the images in Magnum Ireland disprove the adage that every picture is worth a thousand words. Few, apart from those by Henri Cartier-Bresson, stand alone as complete works of art or journalism. The work of Inge Morath at Puck Fair in 1954 or Chris Steele-Perkins dodging bullets behind a gravestone in the 1988 Milltown Massacre cannot convey explanation and context. Gazing into the eyes of Dublin street children in the 1960s or at a fashion shoot in Connemara 1993, one longs to know what their international image makers were looking for in Ireland and whether they found it. Those questions hover around the edges of every carefully cropped rectangle because, as the editors admit, "Photographers make fiction just as skilfully as writers do".
Perhaps as compensation, each decade's collection is punctuated with an essay by an Irish writer. There is also an introduction by John Banville.
Anthony Cronin recalls the "paralysis" of the 1950s, when "Pieties, religious and patriotic, were the staple of every occasion . . . If it sounds like living under the Taliban, it wasn't quite". The pictures which follow are contradictory, the bravado of free time in the Republic contrasting with Eric Lessing's vertigo-inducing perspectives of workers in a Belfast shipyard.
Magnum's image of the 1950s supports Nuala O'Faolain's generalisations about a "grim and simple" student existence in the 1960s. But since their photographs of priests, circuses and Orangemen are cut off in 1965, they get no chance to reflect the bright new revolutionary thinking already on its way from Paris, London and San Francisco.
In the 1970s, a different kind of revolution switched Magnum's concentration to Northern Ireland. Its images of confrontation and horror are testimony to bravery on every front, including the person holding the camera. They also emphasise difference, between trendily dressed but malnourished stone throwers and well-fed Tommies. South of the Border, artists such as Eve Arnold found timeless images of peace, but Peter Marlow's 1979 picture of a vast Mercedes Benz hitched to a cattle trailer heralds the arrival of a new kind of excess.
By the early 1980s, "the sense of collapse was everywhere" and Martin Parr snapped some fine examples of architectural blots on the landscape. For Fintan O'Toole, the Kerry Babies Inquiry of 1985 was "one of the most painfully revelatory events of the decade". Catholic Ireland was falling apart, and the holy water could not be poured back into the bottle.
The gap between Magnum's take on 1990s Ireland and Colm Tóibín's view of the time is too wide to bridge. Ireland's rubbish, piety, aesthetic blindness and healthy looking children seem much the same as what we've seen before. But Tóibín's essay about the fall of Fianna Fáil, church scandals, homosexuality and the economic boom describes very different territory, though he is not yet clear "whether this change in Ireland was serious or subtle . . . But by the end of the decade it was, for most of us, an easier place in which to live".
Five years into "The Noughties", Magnum's pictures back him up. This is good-time Ireland of the secret sorrows: Trinity Ball, pub revels, a sing-song at a dinner party (the poor girl brought her guitar, for God's sake!) and H-Block preserved as heritage. Yet like many of us, Anne Enright "never liked Tourist Ireland. I thought it was all made up". She rejoices in the changes she sees, wrought by new economic migrants and a self confident generation which cannot imagine poverty or repression. But the photographer's film, here and elsewhere, gives us a subtle distorting mirror rather then a reflection of life as we think we lived it.
Aisling Foster is a novelist and critic
Magnum Ireland Edited by Brigitte Lardonois and Val Williams Thames & Hudson, 256pp. £29.95.