Tag Archives: Was It For This?

sackvillest

Sackville Street after the Easter Rising, one of the 1916 images exhibited at Photographers’ Gallery, London

“The exhibition reveals how photography (like Yeats’s poem) served as a weapon of propaganda for the nationalist cause, helping create heroes of the slain and mythologise what was a relatively minor event into one we’re commemorating 100 years on. ”

…The other problem is the rather partisan tone of the wall-texts: the sense of British wrong and Irish right pervades (the decision to paint some of the gallery walls shamrock-green hardly helping).

Hence we’re told that “Ireland’s economic fortunes had declined markedly” after the official Act of Union; that British conduct was frequently “draconian”; that Prime Minister, David Lloyd George “ignored a democratic mandate”, and so on.

…Which is a pity, as the last thing we need is any kind of blame game. If that were the case, one might stress in riposte that the rebels were bankrolled by Germany. But such an approach seems unnecessarily polemical at a time when reconciliation is the order of the day. Besides which, it denies the photographs the proper chance to speak for themselves.”

A two-star review for the Sean Sexton Easter Rising photo collection

Fight!

Easter Rising, The Photographers’ Gallery, review: ‘needs less blame’ (Telegraph)

Thanks Colm King

brick

A chip off the old block?

Oh go on then.

This is an original brick that was under the floor slab of the GPO for the last nearly 200 years. It would have been under the ground when the Easter Rising of 1916 took place and your patriotic heroes had to flee after the British bombing. As we all know that these men later surrendered and were executed by the British….The brick vault was discovered under a concrete slab when excavating for the new 1916 Exhibition Centre.

GPO Pre-1916 Brick (Adverts.ie)

Thanks Pooter