“AFTER I am hanged my portrait will be interesting but not before,” wrote Patrick Pearse, a leader of Ireland's Easter Rising, in a letter to Seamus Doyle, a fellow rebel, as Pearse awaited execution at the hands of the British in 1916. Pearse was one of fifteen men executed for the armed uprising against the British, after decades of fractious relations between the colonial power and the Irish people. The rebels had hoped that the Irish would rise with them, and that the British might be forced to relinquish control of Ireland, distracted as they were by the first world war. Instead the rebels failed to attract the support that they had counted on, and were brutally suppressed, with Dublin shelled by gunboat, and troops sent from Liverpool to fight with rebels in the streets. The insurgents surrendered after six days. Thousands of Irish were arrested and imprisoned, and the subsequent executions followed hasty military trials, a story commemorated in pictures at a new exhibit at The Photographer's Gallery in London.
Pearse was right. After his death a pre-uprising portrait photograph, along with images of the others who were executed, became very interesting indeed. The leaders, some of them completely unknown before the uprising, became household names, with their pictures widely published in newspapers and treasured by sympathisers in specially manufactured lockets. If the rising had failed to gain widespread popular support as it unfolded, the heavy-handed British response set the nationalist cause alight. The photographs of martyrs like Pearse, along with shocking images of the ruins of Dublin, fixed the event in the national consciousness.
Photography has been intertwined with conflict and propaganda ever since the technology was developed in the early 19th century. Less than a decade after William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1841 announcement of the calotype process, photographs of the shelled ruins of Roman villas in the aftermath of the short-lived 1849 Roman Republic were circulating among Italians, whipping up support for the nascent cause of unification and jumpstarting the Risorgimento. Photographs made a claim for unmediated truth—“this building I believe to be the first…to have drawn its own picture,” wrote Talbot—and they could be cheaply reproduced and circulated. A medium almost tailor-made for propaganda.
Yet while this exhibition ostensibly sets out to examine the role photography played in the Rising, it also seems to have an educational purpose, aimed as it is at a British audience in the heart of London. As the collector Sean Sexton notes in the exhibition video, the Irish famine of the 19th century is still widely referred to here as a “famine” rather than, as he puts it controversially, a rather more man-made “starvation”. And while the rising will see extensive memorialisation this year in Ireland, the British are letting its centenary pass a little more quietly.
But the exhibition wears this purpose lightly, and the history lesson is welcome. The Rising is presented as a kind of pivotal moment, turning away from the 19th century towards a more uncertain future in which the once supreme British Empire would be dismantled, bit by bit. Tactics were forged during and after the Rising that would come to define the conflict between the Irish and the British for many decades, from assassination to hunger striking—not to mention heavy-handed and deadly policing. In time the shock-waves would spread across the whole empire –the writings and plight of Terence MacSwiney (pictured), a Sinn Fein member who died in 1920 after a 74-day hunger strike in Brixton prison, would go on to influence Indian activists in their fight for independence.
The fast film and compact cameras that would make possible the dramatic action photojournalism of Robert Capa just twenty years later were unavailable in 1916. So posed portraits, static ruins and staged shots dominate, lending these pictures a bit of the air of the 19th century. Yet, in the role that those photographs played, the Rising comes across as a thoroughly modern media conflict event. The scrapbooks on display show the way that newspaper images of the uprising and its characters were worked, reworked and arranged by those who consumed them, just as editing tools and the internet allow anyone to manipulate and re-present received imagery and video today.
It's clear that for all our apparent photographic sophistication compared to the public of 1916, the value of a good propaganda shot remains just as strong now. From Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the situation room and George Bush in his flight-suit, it's not so far back to those British rifles lined up at the ready behind barrels of Guinness.
"Easter Rising 1916" will be at the Photographer’s Gallery until April 3rd.