Chimney Sweep and Children, Ireland, Alen MacWeeney

Exhibition Label: "Conversation X: “That Invisible Dance": Art and Literature under the British Empire from the 1800s and Beyond," Feb-2011, Sorcha Hyland and Stephen Goddard West Conversation Space Born in Dublin in 1939, Alen MacWeeney began his career as American photographer Richard Avedon’s assistant in New York and Paris in 1959. In 1965 he returned to Dublin to work on a photo essay celebrating the poetry of William Butler Yeats. The essay never materialized but many photographs here reflect its beginnings, particularly MacWeeney’s image of the white horse, an animal that persists throughout Yeats’ work. MacWeeney juxtaposes this version of the native Irish horse-often seen roaming in the wild-with the anachronistic figure of one of the last Anglo-Irish aristocrats, riding sidesaddle in full regalia, reining in her horse with its tightly braided mane. In his photographs of a Dublin encampment of “Tinkers”, or Travellers as they are now known, MacWeeney’s turns his attention to the harsher realities of Irish society. A nomadic and ethnic minority, Travellers traditionally lived in horsedrawn wagons and moved around the Irish countryside “tinkering” on pots and pans, selling rags to the “settled folks, and if they were doing well, trading in piebald horses. Yeats’ brother, the artist Jack B. Yeats, most famously depicted Tinkers featured here in his illustrations for the E.C. Yeats’ Cuala Press broadsides. Unlike his predecessor, MacWeeney avoids romanticizing or caricaturing his subjects, positioning himself at or below eye level with each, emphasizing their resilience without deflecting attention from their impoverished conditions. Travellers continue to be treated as an “invisible” if not outcast population within Irish society, struggling to sustain their nomadic ways, not unlike the Roma (Gypsies) in mainland Europe. MacWeeney’s 1965 photographs capture subjects on the brink of extinction, from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy to Ireland’s still overlooked minority.