On the shelves of Hodges Figgis bookstore in Dublin, there is, naturally enough, a section dedicated to the Great Famine, which has swelled in the last three years of Famine commemoration. It offers everything from collections of statistics, to languid scholarly explorations, and onwards towards potted histories of hunger and the potato.
A short exploration of these volumes quickly reveals that most of them have something in common. From book to book, the same pictures turn up over and over. The issue is not, however, unique to the rash of books which have been published over the past few years. Similar pictures are likely to show up at the Famine Museum in Strokestown Park, Co Roscommon, and any effort to perform an electronic search for some representations yields almost the same material. Earlier this month, an email circular announced that a World Wide Web site now provided very much the same Famine images, indexed by subject and accessible to all Web users.
The sense that there is a gap to be filled when it comes to visual material on the area finds perhaps its most exciting by-product in Steve Woods's recent film, 1848. In the film, Woods uses a labour intensive animation technique to show "real" footage of the effects of the Famine on everyday life. The film is suffused with a strange poignancy, a sense of sadness not simply about the events of the past, but a profound feeling of the absence of a body of crucial images.
Given most of the dates considered significant in the development of photography (say, for example, 1839 when a device was announced to the French Academy of Sciences), it would have been possible for a camera to have appeared among the rotten potatoes, emaciated corpses and flattened buildings of Ireland in the late 1840s. The lack of a body of photographic images which could in some sense "explain" has left a strange hunger of its own; one that has lead to a constant consumption and regurgitation of the few scraps that exist.
Without photo images, writers and readers are forced to rely on painted, sketched, carved and drawn images. Images such as Daniel McDonald's emotive, if anatomically ambiguous, The Discovery Of The Potato Blight In Ireland, from around 1847. Since this is a full colour picture, it has suffered the fate of being endlessly reproduced.
But even with the small catalogue of Famine images available, some mistiness has developed. Helen Litton's 1994 publication, The Irish Famine: An Illustrated History, displays a dark drawing of a dense, ragged crowd "begging for food outside a workhouse". The same picture reproduced in Noel Kissane's The Irish Famine: A Documentary History is accompanied by a caption pointing out that the image was made by a later artist, features an anachronistic gas lamp and was possibly based on an English source.
Another celebrated image, Funeral At Skibbereen, taken from an illustrated newspaper, shows the cadaver of a young boy being carried away on a horsecart. Oddly, however, the boy's limp body dangling over the edge of the cart strongly recalls motifs from Gericault's epic painting, The Raft Of The Medusa from 1819.
With such an insecure field, it is hardly surprising that anything that appears to be a substantial, coherent collection of images quickly assumes a central position. One such body of images, arguably the most reproduced of all Famine illustration, is usually ascribed to Irish artist James Mahoney.
Mahoney, who was born in Cork in 1816, was the son of a carpenter. He studied in Rome and spent some years travelling in Europe, as any respectable artist of the period did. The watercolour images he regularly exhibited at the Royal Hibernia Academy have titles that reflect the paths of his Grand Tour, views of Rome and Naples, of Rouen, of romantic moon-lit landscapes. When he returned to Cork in 1842 he set himself up as an artist, with premises at 34 Nile Street. He exhibited regularly at the RHA and later went travelling again, this time to Spain. In 1859 he left Ireland for London. In London he worked as a wood engraver on the Illustrated London News, as well as on book illustrations, including a version of Dickens's Little Dorrit.
Between 1846 and 1850, more than 40 pictures, the majority accredited to Mahoney, of the Famine in Ireland were published in the then hightech Illustrated London News, the world's first illustrated newspaper. Many of these pictures have in recent years risen to the status of being our dominant visual images of the Great Famine. But even if these pictures play an unparalleled role in the representation of the look and feel of the Great Hunger, they are very far from uncomplicated, unchallengable representations. Their continued appeal stems perhaps from their highly dramatic style, a style adopted in order to create highly emotive, rather than highly accurate, images.
But there are other aspects of the images' origins which have to be kept in mind. Getting pictures into print in the Victorian media was a long and complex process which almost totally undermined any sense of the authority of the singular, on-site artist as witness. Historian Stephen Houfe, writing of the Illustrated London News, says that it was not usual for its images to be based on rapid sketches covered with notes and directions which had been "sent back to competent home-based artists who could disentangle them and create a composition". Once the notes and comments had been decoded, and the image re-created, it then had to be copied to tight-grained boxwood blocks and processed by specialist engravers. In most cases, the image would be divided into eight, 16, 24 or even up to 64 pieces. To increase the speed at which images could be produced, each of these wooden blocks was engraved by a separate artist. These blocks would then be gathered and bolted together, and perhaps given some harmonising work by a master engraver. Only at this stage would one of Mahoney's "quick" sketches appear in print.
Brian Hand is an artist whose work frequently has a strong element of image research. His recent show at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin involved tracking down newsreel footage of Irish Sweepstakes pageants from the late 1930s. He also worked for three years collaborating on the creation of the Famine Museum at Strokestown, where the display includes the Mahoney images. According to Hand, images such as Mahoney's Bridget O'Donnell And Her Children (which first appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1849) are frequently interpreted and consumed without much respect for their original context and origins.
"Mahoney's sketches would not usually be made on the spot, or even from one incident. They would be collection images reworked at some later point, often filtered through European traditions of symbolic representation," says Hand. "Some of the images are staged in a Gothic style. They involve a complex web of signs. They are part of a sophisticated form of media representation with its own codes, but that is seldom referred to when the images are represented, or even translated into public sculpture."
Niamh O'Sullivan, an expert on 19th-century engravings, has similar misgivings about the way such images pass into general circulation. "They even turn up in school history books and there is no hint of the complexity of the image," says O'Sullivan. "There is no examination of where the artist was coming from, or the significance of the image or of the place of one particular image in a group of illustrations . . ."
Recently, Mahoney's images have found themselves adjusted, fine-tuned once more, and delivered through the World Wide Web site, Views Of The Famine. The site is the work of Irish-American Steve Taylor, of Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia. Taylor decided to acknowledge his Irish ancestry and the Great Famine by establishing a pictorial archive on the Internet.
"My first idea was to display some old pictures of immigrants arriving at New York harbour," says Taylor. "When I looked through a few books, I noticed that several had these contemporary engravings from the Illustrated London News. Since my office is in a university library, I decided to see if we had that newspaper on microfilm. To my surprise, we had the entire collection, from 1840, on paper." Replacing the Illustrated London News' roomful of superstar engravers, Taylor used a flatbed scanner to digitise all available Famine images. (He also decided to reproduce any accompanying texts on his site and, as this did not scan well, he gave his free time over to retyping every word of Mahoney's reports.)
Next to some Web contributions on the Famine, which include a game centred on watching the progress of potato blight through an electronic potato plant, Taylor's is a work of cool accumulative scholarship. It opens with Daniel McDonald's potato blight painting, but soon branches away to contemporary newspaper images.
While McDonald's image looks too lush and too rich, too velvety in its tones for its subject matter, the Mahoney images sit rather comfortably in the new medium. Perhaps this should not be surprising, after all; the meanings these images have gathered have come from the same process of adaptation involved in their latest incarnation. The only difference this time is that instead of revealing good yellow paper, the gaps from which the journal's engravers have scored away thin layers of boxwood are filled with that special vibrating brightness which signifies the end of a long journey through the labyrinth of the Net.
Next Tuesday: Fintan O'Toole looks at the cultural legacy of 1798
