For over five years, Dublin-born Alen MacWeeney (born 1939) photographed
the native itinerants of Ireland known as Travellers, spending countless
evenings in their caravans and by their campfires, drinking tea and listening to
their tales, songs and music. In a memoir of this period, the photographer
describes his attraction to the lifestyle of his companions: “Theirs was a
bigger way of life than mine, with its daily struggle for survival, compared to
my struggle to find images symbolic and representative of that life.”
With Irish
Travellers, MacWeeney has crafted a profoundly beautiful record
of a slowly vanishing way of life rarely seen by outsiders, let alone captured
by a camera. Author and winner of the Man Booker prize John Banville
compared Irish Travellers to “Edward Curtis’s
masterly recuperation of the American Indian.” Alen MacWeeney’s photographs are
essential records of a vanishing culture.
All images © Alen MacWeeney
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