The Annie Brophy exhibition of photographs offers a captivating chronicle of old Waterford City, writes Catherine Foley
Not long after making my First Holy Communion, my mother took me to Annie Brophy's photographic studio at 9 Barker Street in Waterford city. Even to my young ears, the name of the photographer was legendary.
I was dressed in my white dress, shoes and socks. I had my little white handbag draped over my arm and I took my veil along too. My two sisters were called in from the garden to be dressed in clean clothes and we all set off for "the shoot".
My memory of the visit is dim but I do remember that it didn't take long. Brophy was business-like, deft and brusque, completely focused on the job in hand. A woman of few words. She pulled a brass tub closer to the stool where I was to sit. She then disappeared under the camera's black hood, told me to look at her and not to move, and we waited to hear the click, terrified to move.
Brophy photographed me sitting and standing, and she took a family shot of the four of us. In each photograph I am looking directly into the camera, smiling. There is a kind of timeless stillness to these black-and-white photographs. My mother looks like a film star. Brophy had photographed her nearly 30 years earlier for her Holy Communion. We treasure this photograph, as we have no other photograph of my mother at that time.
A photographic exhibition of Brophy's photographs from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, featuring babies, toddlers and their parents, opened late last month in the city's library, to coincide with Bealtaine Festival, which celebrates creativity in older people throughout May. This is the third exhibition of the photographer's work to be held in the city, according to Donal Moore, Waterford city archivist.
There has been a steady stream of visitors to the library's exhibition since it opened in late April. Viewers peer at the faces, the hairstyles, the clothes, the shoes, the body language and the eyes. They smile at the memories that have almost slipped from consciousness as they recall days that are no more. The photographs all commemorate times that have gone beyond a point when it is almost too late to recapture them. As time lapses and the decades roll by, the value of Brophy's images seems to deepen. Her work, without any obvious artifice, is straightforward and honest and it continues to resonate with people.
"A camera is a time machine enabling us to look backwards at leisure because sometimes life's important moments are over too quickly. Photographs can be a very real social commentary on their time," says Terry Murphy, a commercial photographer and consultant graphic designer in Waterford. Photographers, he said at the exhibition's opening, "capture what is actual; from then on the image remains a testimony to how things were at that moment, on that day, in that year, in that century".
"She chronicled the people of the city for over 50 years," he says. "It's rare that such a large collection would have remained intact and that it can, and will, be preserved for posterity." Her photographic archive forms "a priceless window into the past".
Brophy's archive collection of 60,000 negatives was bought by the City Council in 2004. Like many young people growing up in Waterford city, being photographed in her studio was a kind of a rite of passage for me.
Brophy's career spanned six decades, from the opening of her studio in 1922 to her retirement in 1978. She was a private person and did not marry, and she died in 1986 at the age of 87.
"The greatness of Annie Brophy springs not only from her skill as a photographer, but in the fact that her negative archive is preserved so well for future generations to enjoy and learn from," says Murphy. He believes Brophy was the first female professional photographer to work in the country.
AMONG THE VISITORS to the exhibition was Betty Cuddihy, from Tramore, Co Waterford, who recalled her own experience of being photographed by Brophy. The photograph of her aged five months with her parents, Michael and Christine Nugent, who died recently, is "valuable to us, especially since our parents died. It's lovely looking at them," she said. "Brophy," she added, "is part of the sentimentality of Waterford."
Some believe the value of Brophy's photographs goes beyond sentiment. "Painters who specialise in social commentary cannot match the prolific output of a long-lived photographer like Annie," says Murphy. "Also, painters omit inconvenient details for compositional reasons."
As Moore points out, the visitors' book is full of names and comments. "The interest in this exhibition is huge," he says. "Half the city had their photograph taken by her. There's a good chance that anybody over the age of 35 was photographed by her." The archive will eventually be converted to digital format.
"She was a businesswoman, a very private woman. She was an artist and a perfectionist. When you look at the poses, at the composition, at the retouching and the hand-painting, she was a photographic artist," says Moore. "From a lifetime of experience, she knew how to compose and present photographs."
Annie Brophy was educated at the Mercy Convent, where she was singled out as a student with artistic flair. She began her photographic career in the early 1900s under the tutelage of Mr B Hughes, of Manor Street, a prominent photographer at the time. On finishing her studies, she set up her own business.
Moore continues to research the photographs, which were labelled meticulously by Brophy throughout her career. She kept records all her life, always writing down the address and name of the person who commissioned the photograph. Even so, the identity of a child or an adult can prove elusive when up to 50 years have passed, when a street or a house no longer exists and when a family name is not enough. Moore's detective work in naming the individual babies and toddlers continues. He has combed through electoral registers and old phone books. The nature of archival work dealing with recent time that is slipping away is so near and yet so far.
As Moore began to curate the show, he had very little information on the identity of the subjects. He made phone calls and put some of the photographs in local newspapers in the hope that readers might be able to identify the faces. Slowly the information began to come together. Then, on opening night, a number of subjects were identified by relatives and friends. Caroline Boland, a beautiful little dark-haired girl, was identified by her sister, Joan Power, who was the caterer at the event. A beautiful little blonde-haired subject from John's Hill, photographed in 1948, was identified as one of the city's traffic wardens, Albert Thornton.
TO FULLY APPRECIATE Annie Brophy's work, says Murphy, "one has to understand something of the technical difficulties that she would have worked under."
There were no electronic light meters in Annie's day. Exposures were assessed probably by judging the relationship between her fill light and the varying amount of daylight that came through the windows.
The chemicals she used would have changed little since the dawn of photography in the 1840s. Her studio was mostly lit by daylight, supplemented by a large tungsten lamp to fill in the shadows. "Film for much of Annie's career was relatively insensitive to light - so exposures were long," says Murphy. "Yet she didn't spoil many exposures with subject movement - so she must have been expert in choosing, as Cartier Bresson called it, the decisive moment. This is the key to her work. Choosing the right instant to click the shutter and freeze a moment in time."
Brophy Babies: Images of Children from the Annie Brophy Collection continues at the Central Library, Lady Lane in Waterford until Saturday, May 26
Photographs by Annie Brophy from the Brophy Babies exhibition, at Waterford Central Library