Old Ireland in Colour. John Breslin
In 1839, Louis Daguerre announced his discovery of the process of photography. In 1841, professional photography was introduced to Ireland, and by 1881 most counties had at least one photographer, many of them being women. For over a century, photographers – both professional and amateur – captured and collected moments in our history in black and white, the technology of the time. These are incredibly important historical sources, but just as we do today, people from this period lived their lives in colour, and we believe it is important to try to view their lives in this way.
This book, and the Old Ireland in Colour project, aims to bring Ireland’s modern history to life through the colourisation of black and white photographs. The first hundred years of photography, during which most of the images in this book were taken, was one of dramatic demographic, social, economic, political, cultural and technological change in Ireland and internationally. This change and transformation is a key tenet of this book and the photographs it contains. Each was chosen with several considerations in mind: a reflection of Ireland’s different social classes, the need for a diverse geographical spread, permissions and availability, and the importance of gender, religion and ethnicity. Although Ireland was predominantly agricultural at the turn of the twentieth century, urban life and streetscapes are an important feature. Yet the dominance of the West of Ireland cannot be denied – due in part to the wealth and focus of the Folklore Collection from the 1930s, and the initial work and interest of John’s Old Ireland in Colour project.
As Marina Amaral and Dan Jones state in their hugely successful book The Colour of Time, there ‘are many more omissions than inclusions’ in this book. This collection is not a comprehensive history of Ireland, nor is it a history of photography in Ireland. This has been explored, and explored well, by other scholars – Seán Sexton and Christine Kinealy’s The Irish: A Photohistory: 1840–1940, Ciara Breathnach’s Framing the West and Erika Hanna’s more recent Snapshot Stories: Visuality, Photography, and the Social History of Ireland, 1922–2000 being prime examples. It is, however, a cross section of Ireland’s remarkable photographic collections colourised through consultation with available historical sources. We have chosen to group these photographs thematically, and within these sections, we have largely adhered to a chronological order. In some cases, we have provided long captions, in others we feel the photograph speaks for itself and we have acknowledged who and where it came from. Our categorisation has also been driven by public interest in the history of Ireland and the Irish – particularly the history of the Irish revolution, social and cultural history, gender history, the history of the Irish abroad, and images of Ireland’s beautiful landscapes and streetscapes.
Debates on the colourisation of black and white films and photographs have been ongoing since the 1980s. We do not wish to engage in these debates in this book; the purpose of the book for us is to reveal the capacity of modern technologies to provide realistic images with a wide palette of historical colours. While we are very aware of issues of consent when looking at the history of photography and individuals, we believe this is also an issue when using photographs from these collections in other academic and non-academic works. In this book, we believe we are drawing attention to existing collections as opposed to replacing them in any way.
The 173 photographs in this book address the period from just before the Great Famine (1845–52) to the outbreak of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. During this time, the population of the island of Ireland went from over 8 million to a low of 4 million in the 1950s. Throughout the nineteenth century, we can see the importance of religion and the Irish language, the effects of the Great Famine and the Land War, and the growth in cultural nationalism. Work, play, technology and deviance are mingled between images of Irish landscapes and revolution. The public and the private are intertwined. There are familiar personalities and events, images that have been mass-produced and those that we have rarely seen. Social change is explored in many forms – through images of evictions and depictions of poverty, alongside earth-shattering events like the sinkings of the Titanic and the Lusitania. There is a focus on folklore, music, rural life and tradition, the Irish pub, and Ireland’s islands. Work, and changes to work, as well as glimpses of the gentry or Anglo-Irish class emerge. Changes in clothing and play bring with them nostalgia and thoughts of our own childhoods. With that in mind, we have chosen to include a section on women and children, both of whose lives changed enormously during these years. Some of these changes include suffrage, the introduction of compulsory schooling, the opening up of spaces for women to work and study, advances like running water and electrification, changes to medicine and maternity care. Women and children are also prominent in the first section of the book, which begins with the iconic image of Edward Carson signing the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant. Another section deals with the Irish abroad, and it covers everyone from the Catalpa Six and Violet Gibson (also known as the woman who shot Mussolini) to cultural figures like Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, as well as artists, writers, actresses, politicians and performers who travelled from Ireland to countries around the globe for a variety of reasons. Some would be celebrated, others vilified. We end the book with images of Ireland that we feel represent its variety, its essence, and its beauty.
Old Ireland in Colour: The Project
Old Ireland in Colour started in 2019 when John developed an interest in historic photo colourisation, enhancement and restoration through personal genealogical research. He began to colourise old family photos – photos of his grandparents from Fanore in Co. Clare and Glenties in Co. Donegal. After discovering DeOldify, an application used for colourising images, he moved from family photographs to photographs of Galway and Connemara, and then on to others taken across the island of Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After a few months, the Old Ireland in Colour project was born, and since then thousands of photographs have been colourised and the project now has tens of thousands of followers online. In early 2020, Sarah-Anne joined John to advise on the historical content for this book.
The technology is a key part of the process. DeOldify was originally developed by American programmer Jason Antic in 2018 and later by programmer Dana Kelley. While at a meeting in San Diego in 2019, John met Jason and Dana and they discussed colourisation, their entrepreneurial plans, and ancestral links to Ireland. DeOldify works by learning what colours should be applied to different textures, shapes and objects in black and white photos, using models that are trained on a large bank of millions of colour images. The accuracy of the colours is as good as what can normally be expected for a certain type of texture or shape encountered in the image bank. Grass, trees and the sea usually come out very well. Roofs sometimes (but not always) emerge with the wrong colour tiles. Quite often clothes are colourised with an averaged blue or purple colour, whereas you may know that they should be a particular hue. In those cases, all you can do is carry out some post-processing where you touch up or manually adjust that colour in an image-editing package e.g. Photoshop. There are many incidents where there is either a historical record or some human intuition or knowledge that the colour is just not right. For example, we have manually changed Constance Markievicz’s uniform from navy/purple to bottle green, the shawls of Claddagh women to red and Tom Crean’s woollen jumpers to any colour but lilac! The most common change is where we have had to manually touch up an ear, arm or leg that was not automatically colourised for some reason (e.g., if it was partially obscured so not recognised as such). Sometimes these colourisations are controversial – for example, in the case of Elizabeth O’Farrell and the surrender in 1916, we colourised what we saw as being her hood in blue and the hem of her dress in red/brown, with a green greatcoat for Pearse in the foreground, whereas others have interpreted more of O’Farrell’s dress being visible and no greatcoat worn by Pearse (see p. 34). They are also influenced by the availability of primary sources. We know, for example, that Violet Gibson had blueish eyes and white hair from her police ID report; similarly, Ellis Island records pointed to Muriel Murphy MacSwiney’s blue/grey eyes. Prison records also lead us to physical details of the Catalpa Six, while Peig Sayers' eye colour is told to us by the folklore collector Kenneth Jackson. It is always the case that new information can come to light post-colourisation, and over the past year we have updated various photos as this has occurred. In the aforementioned Ellis Island records, we later found a passenger record for Markievich instead of Markievicz, and updated her eye colour to blue in her return from prison photograph (see p. 47). Irish and British uniforms and vehicles are colourised according to advice