The Gallery of Photography, now firmly installed in its new home on Meeting House Square in Dublin's Temple Bar, began life on Wellington Quay in 1978. It was part of Temple Bar's first incarnation as a cultural quarter, one dependent on low rental costs, due to the fact that the area was marked for demolition to make way for a giant bus station. Enterprises like Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, and the Gallery of Photography were possible because they inhabited this marginalised space - and because of a huge investment of creative energy on the part of a relatively small number of people.
In the case of the Gallery of Photography one person above all others was responsible: its founder, John Osman. If you visited the gallery in its early days, in its cavernous shop-front premises facing the Liffey (now remodelled as a piano showroom), you couldn't help but be aware of Osman's irrepressible, infectious enthusiasm for photography. His relaxed, good-humoured manner, which carried over into the atmosphere of the gallery (to the occasional dismay of more bureaucratically-inclined arts administrators) belied the sheer hard labour that he continually poured into the project.
In fact, he is such a laid-back character that you wonder how he ever committed himself to a pioneering venture that obviously couldn't provide financial remuneration to justify the effort. As he notes with engaging frankness, it wasn't "a profitable move and involved significantly more work than I was used to or cared for".
What it did provide for him was the chance to be in the company of the work of all manner of photographers - and the chance to further his passion for collecting photographs. For, as he confesses in a note accompanying the current exhibition at the Gallery of Photography, he is a collector, and, though as a photographer he is a happy amateur with no delusions of grandeur, "collecting other photographers' work enabled me to mingle with the gods". Now The Lighting Strike and other stories . . . marshals 100 photographs from his collection, and provides his own informal, anecdotal account of his involvement with photography.
His collection extends right back to photography's beginnings. In fact he has a very early work, dated around 1843, by the inventor of the negative-positive process, Henry Fox Talbot, and an example of a daguerreotype from 1850.
Photography is a medium of record, but the encyclopedic range of Osman's collection gives some sense of its omnivorous appetite. "I still can't find a discernible theme," as he puts it, other than the fact that he worked on a limited budget and took whatever opportunities arose. His quirky sense of humour does come through in, for example, the print that gives the show its title.
It records an extraordinary star-shaped scar on the bare bottom of a soldier struck by lightning in 1909, and it is from a set of albums relating to the life of Brig Gen John Hammersley. One 1930 image presents a strong case for time travel, depicting as it does a man leaning on the wall of Aston Quay at O'Connell Bridge with what seems to be a mobile phone clamped to his ear. There is a Grannies' Yuletide Choir straight out of an Ealing comedy and a couple of positively surreal fashion snaps from the 1950s, on which Osman comments wryly: "As anyone who has ever seen me will confirm, I have absolutely no interest in fashion."
Fascinating historical documents include a set of 1960s prints from negatives made in Dublin between 1913 and 1919, attributed to either Joseph Cashman or Brendan Keogh, with a classic view of the baton charge in O'Connell Street in 1913, a raid by British soldiers after the 1916 Rising, plus a fine study of Griffith, Dev, Laurence O'Neill and Collins, wanted men at the time, laughing and joking at a hurling match in Croke Park. Robert French's portrait of newspaper vendor Davy Stephens is displayed next to James Joyce's faithful description of him in Ulysses, "minute in a large capecoat, a small felt hat crowning his ringlets".
Some of the gods Osman mingles with are Weegee, Diane Arbus, Bill Brandt, Robert Doisneau, Julia Margaret Cameron and even Lewis Carroll. It's interesting to see a series of Dublin city landmarks by Brandt, including Kilmainham Gaol and Oscar Wilde's birthplace on Merrion Square. Brandt's reportage projects and powerfully graphic style were hugely influential, but it's surprising to see just how darkly he printed these images. There's another kind of darkness in Arbus's work.
Osman's print, a striking study of a young giant at home with his parents in their Bronx apartment, was made in 1970, the year before her death, and has her characteristic traits of physical strangeness and psychological undercurrents.
Irish photographers are well represented, with good examples of the work of Bill Doyle, Fergus Bourke, Anthony Haughey, Michael Boran and Sean Hillen. It's an enormously entertaining show, though its one obvious drawback is that it is such a miscellany, indicating myriad possibilities that it doesn't have the space to explore. But then, as the gallery's current director, Tanya Kiang puts it: "Without even realising it, you get a painless introduction to the history of photography."
A fully illustrated book The Lightning Strike and other stories . . . (£9.95) accompanies the exhibition
