If you live, as I do, in a part of Ireland popular with tourists,
you become hardened to the transactions involved in photography.
Your own mild bay and headland stares at you, lurid, from
the postcards on sale beside every till. You shrug, embarrassed,
at the garish images you catch sight of in brochures that
have lured visitors across the sea to confront the singularly
evasive reality of Ireland. You see the holiday makers lined
up, laughing, their hair blowing across their faces for the
friend who shouts ‘Say cheese!’ Their wellbeing
will be there in the holiday snap, but the place where they
stood might be anywhere. At a scenic bend of the road near
my cottage, there are as many pointing lenses, sometimes,
as outside a celebrity premiere. A local man tethers his donkey
there, and he fixes a pipe between the donkey’s teeth,
and – click-click! – the tourists photograph the
pipe-smoking Irish donkey. What else can they do with it?
And then, this. This American child of Ireland gives us these
photographs.
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