People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them

—James Baldwin

National Museum of Ireland decorative and History I Collins Barracks, Benburb Street, Dublin 7 held photo exhibition, Ireland in Focus: Photographing the 1950’s to celebrate the works of three photographers from France and North America. The exhibition will be held from 21^st November,2019 to April 2020. The photography highlights the Irish history of 1950’s, showing the live hood of the people during that period of time.

The exhibition namely Ireland in Focus: Photographing the 1950’s captured the soul and essence of the people during that era. It’s the collections of these people that was created during the time where it was generally regarded as hardest decades in the twentieth-century in Ireland. The exhibition highlights the three photographer’s style of the portraying Ireland from the places they once visited. Among the three photographers, Henri-Cariter-Bresson’s photography was showcase. He is a world-renowned photographer who completed two photographic missions in Ireland. One was from Harper’s Bazaar magazine when he arrived in Dublin in June 1962. He travelled a lot of places in Ireland like Dublin, Kildare, Westmeath, Galway, Kerry, Cork, Tipperary. Kilkenny, Waterfond and Wexford. In the exhibition, his images include like landscapes, street scenes, portraits and public events that captured the timeless pieces from 1950s’ Ireland.

The Paris-Based Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson loans over fifty images to the National Museum of Ireland for this exhibition. Many are exclusive, never shown before pictures and there are selected photographs from the photographic collections from the 1950’s along with other works of the photographer. There were the works from another renowned American photographer, Dorothea Lange who had travelled the Ireland in 1954 during the assignment on the Life magazine. Her works had a collection of photographs from County Clare. There, she took more than three thousand pictures which is a part of this exhibition. The Paris-based American Anthropologist, Robert Cresswell’s work was also showcase in this exhibition. He lived over a year in Kinvara, County Galway during 1955 and 1956 that was shown through his photography. He took over four hundred photographs in the place where he lived that includes a set of Kodakchrome Slides that was shown to the audiences as they pace towards other works of the photographers. His photography was taken as a part of his fieldwork and that captured the daily life of the rural community. He had published his finding on the based of what now we call as a part of seminal anthropological study of rural community, Une Communaute Rurale de l’lrlande.

The pictures range from the collection of day to day of the people minding their business where each photographer have captured the beautiful memoir of the old times and the way they carried out their framing to bonding with their families. You can really see such artistic style in a photography like that of the one particular picture by Robert Cresswell’s Corpus Christi Procession, Kinvara 1955-56 where you can feel as if you are inside that portrait of children marching down the street of Kinvara.