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Email PageIrish Travellers and Yeats
September 6, 2007- September 29, 2007
Reception: September 6, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Alen MacWeeney
Steven Kasher Gallery
521 W 23rd StSteven Kasher Gallery is proud to present a pair of complimentary photographic projects made by Alen MacWeeney in Ireland between 1965 and 1969. The exhibition will present over 70 vintage and modern prints. This show accompanies the publication of Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More and also surveys MacWeeney’s classic images based on the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Together the two bodies of work present Alen MacWeeney as a documentary romantic whose subjects include the survival of the pre-modern in the modern world, the survival of individuality against all odds, the survival of innocence in experience, and the survival of Ireland in the mind.
In 1965, Alen MacWeeney came upon an encampment of itinerants in a waste ground by the Cherry Orchard Fever Hospital outside Dublin. Called tinkers and later styled Travellers, as they preferred to call themselves, they were living in richly colored caravans, ramshackle sheds, and time-worn tents. MacWeeney was captivated by their independence, individuality, and endurance, despite the bleakness of their circumstances. Accepted by the Travellers, he began to take photographs. Over five years, he spent countless evenings in the Travellers’ caravans and by their campfires, drinking tea and listening to their tales, songs, and music -- which had been rarely shared or captured by camera and tape recorder. (The CD included with the book includes Travellers’ music, songs, and stories.) In a moving essay about his days and nights among them, MacWeeney writes: “Theirs was a bigger way of life than mine, with its daily struggle for survival, compared to my struggle to find images symbolic and representative of that life.” In Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More, Alen MacWeeney has created a superb record of a vanishing way of life and created a photographic masterwork.
MacWeeney’s well-known Yeats pictures were shot concurrently with his study of the Travellers. When MacWeeney went back to his native sod after many years away he was full of Yeats as only an Irishman can be full of Yeats. He didn’t attempt slavishly to translate the poetry into pictures. Instead he collaborated with the words, filled himself with them, and photographed under their heady influence. The results – pure MacWeeney, resonantly Yeatsian, quintessentially Irish – are things mysteriously more than the sum of their parts. They speak of the feel for place, of the yearning of the émigré, of the hold of the master over the disciple, of the strange transmutation of word to image and image to symbol.
Alen MacWeeney was born in Dublin in 1939 and came to the United States at the age of twenty-one to become assistant to Richard Avedon. His photographs are in over sixty public collections in the U.S. and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of five books of photography. MacWeeney resides in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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