'The Waters and the Wild': Alen MacWeeney Photographs of Ireland

Born in Dublin in 1939, Alen MacWeeney began taking photographs at age twenty while working as an assistant to Richard Avedon in New York. After enduring four sweltering summers in the city, MacWeeney returned to Ireland in 1965, the centenary of W.B. Yeats' birth. He envisioned a short-term project inspired by Yeats' poetry and what MacWeeney called "the Ireland of my imagination." He did not intend the photographs to interpret Yeats' poetry; rather, he hoped to explore the kinds of people, places, and settings that inhabited the poems. MacWeeney read Yeats intensively throughout this period, resulting in several series of photographs that relate to specific poems. For one portfolio presented in this exhibition, he selected lines from the beginning and middle of one of Yeats' most powerful political poems, "Easter, 1916," creating meaning for his photographs using Yeats's words.

While working one of the Yeats photo essays, MacWeeney stumbled into an encampment of Irish Travellers near the Cherry Orchard Fever Hospital outside Dublin. The Travellers, similar to the Roma of eastern Europe, are known derisively as "gypsies" because of their historically itinerant lifestyle, or "tinkers," because many held side occupations as metalworkers. Despite their traditionally insular nature, the Travellers eventually accepted MacWeeney's presence and considered him a friend. He describes them as "breathtakingly beautiful, with remarkable features; a raw dignity and fearlessness about them." MacWeeney spent six years taking photographs and recording Traveller stories and music. Images from this period, ten of which appear in this exhibition, reveal the Travellers' strength and resiliency, their familial bonds, and their commitment to a way of life far removed from the Ireland familiar to MacWeeney.

'The Waters and the Wild:' Alen MacWeeney Photographs of Ireland is drawn primarily from the Museum's permanent collection of works on paper. The exhibition also features a number of objects from the Yeats Collection held in Emory's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL), including an early printing of "Easter, 1916," and letters between Yeats and his unrequited love, the Irish nationalist beauty Maud Gonne.