Beyond the domestic: women photographers in Ireland 1853-1913

Abstract

This thesis aims to challenge the popular assumption that, in Ireland as elsewhere, women’s amateur photographic practices in the nineteenth century were limited to the domestic environs. The thesis sets out four case studies demonstrating that women amateurs engaged with a photography that, from the mid nineteenth-century, looked outwards. The case studies illustrate that women negotiated the restrictions of their gender to engage with other interests beyond the domestic sphere. Analysis reveals that these negotiations and interests were articulated visually through their photography.

Because of a protracted period of social and political turbulence that dominated in Ireland for much of the nineteenth century, the practice of amateur photography also necessitated a negotiation of the political and the cultural that presented further challenges. These negotiations problematise any close investigation of Irish photography. A multi-disciplinary approach incorporating theories of photographic history, Irish history and gender studies has been used in order to locate the photographs within their contexts. Contextual analysis in each of these areas was undertaken at the site of production in order to underpin the readings of the photographs.

Beginning with Countess Rosse of Birr Castle, the case studies examine the activities of the early amateur in mid-nineteenth century period. The album of Hariot Lady Dufferin of Clandeboye, who photographed in India in the mid-1880s is then investigated. The final two case studies explore the expanding uses of photography around the turn of the twentieth century in institutional contexts, specifically photographic surveys and the contributions of Mary K Andrews from Belfast and Jane W Shackleton from Dublin. The research reveals that in some cases Ireland’s women amateurs operated from within a complex matrix of fractured identities. While the boundaries between separate spheres became blurred and women amateurs practiced alongside male counterparts towards the end of the nineteenth century, findings reveal that while women engaged with photography that demonstrated areas of interest that lay beyond the domestic realm, gender is nonetheless visible in the majority of the case studies analysed.

Thesis is embargoed until 31st March 2017

Date of Award	Mar 2015
Original language	English
Sponsors	Department of Employment and Learning (DEL)
Supervisor	Sarah Edge (Supervisor) & Gail Baylis (Supervisor)