About the Book
In 1965, Alen MacWeeney came upon an encampment of itinerants in a waste ground by the Cherry Orchard Fever Hospital outside Dublin. Then called tinkers and later formally styled Travellers by the Irish Government, they were living in beatup caravans, ramshackle sheds, and time-worn tents. MacWeeney was captivated by their independence, individuality, and endurance, despite their bleak circumstances. Clearly impoverished, Travellers were alienated - partly by choice - from greater Irish society. They lived catch-as-catch-can. Traditionally, tinkers had been tinsmiths and pot menders; always, they had been horse traders, and they continued to keep some piebald horses. They worked now and again as turf-cutters or chimney sweeps. The women begged in the streets of Dublin and large towns; some told fortunes. They were not welcomed in the country towns of Ireland, where they set up their encampments in lay-bys and cul-de-sacs, littering the roadsides with their waste, hanging their washing on bushes.
To Alen MacWeeney, they recalled the migrant farmers of the great American Depression - poor, white, and dispossessed - as the government attempted to get them off the roads of Ireland and gather them in settlements. Although they had been eligible for the dole since 1963, the tinkers - become - Travellers cherished their wayward, ancestral lifestyle. Already noted in the United States as a photographer of great sensitivity, MacWeeney became accepted by the Travellers and began to photograph them. In a moving essay in the book, he 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." 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 - "rarely shared or exposed to camera and tape recorder."
About the Author :
Alen MacWeeney was born in Dublin and came to the United States at age 21 to become assistant to renowned photographer Richard Avedon. He soon established himself as a contributor to such journals as the New Yorker, Life, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine. He has produced seven books, including Bloomsbury Reflections, Irish Stone Walls and Fabled Landscapes, and Spaces for Silences (2002). The feature length documentary film Traveller, inspired by MacWeeney's photographs, and which he co-directed, was broadcast on RTE in Ireland in 2002 and by the BBC in 2003. Bairbre Ni Fhloinn of the Department of Irish Folklore at University College Dublin contributes an introduction to Irish Travellers and transcribes from MacWeeney's tapes five remarkable stories told by Traveller Johnny Cassidy, providing notes to the stories, as well as to the songs on the CD included with the book.
Review :
"[A] spare but lovely book, a stirring cultural miscellany from a community that remains invisible to many-in both the general public and the historic record ("like so many marginalised people"). As MacWeeney notes, "Theirs was a bigger life than mine, with its daily struggle for survival"; in page after page of beautiful black and white photos, that struggle is captured in the Travellers' faces, by turns despairing, hopeful, joyous and solemn, but also belied in scenes of celebration, laughter and music-making. If there's a fault to find, it's in the volume's brevity; like the Travellers themselves, it's gone before you're ready to stop looking and learning."--Publishers' Weekly (Starred Review)
"The black-and-white photographs . . . are at once beautiful and heart-breaking. . . In his introduction, the author talks of the 'raw beauty' of those he photographed. That's good. That almost catches the dirt, hardship and bleakness that surrounded the Travellers of 1960s Ireland. But it's in the pictures themselves that Traveller courage and beauty truly shine through." --Irish Echo
"Though Travellers are known as a closed and clannish bunch, MacWeeney had no trouble making friends in Cherry Orchard and the other camps he went on to visit. The Travellers found it endlessly amusing to listen to the recordings he made of their singing, since most had never heard themselves before. They appreciated the rapt attention he paid to the folk tales they told him, and they treasured the portraits he gave them, sometimes fashioning foil frames for them out of chocolate wrappers. 'He'd sit down with us all, light the fire, like one of our own . . . He had time for you like, ' says Kitty Flynn, a Traveller woman MacWeeney befriended." --Smithsonian
