Contribution by Montana Gael

Note: This piece is part of a series of blogs commissioned by the Unsilencing Black Voices team, Sandrine Ndahiro and Catherine Osikoya, in which writers respond to Douglass’s visit to Ireland.  

“….I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people.”

— Frederick Douglass in Ireland, 1845-1846

Montana Gael

Few photographic images have surfaced from Ireland in the 1840s, and none at all of the Górta Mór, the famine years so perilous in the island’s history. Into this invisible world—one that we who live now, in a world of overlapping images, cannot fathom—came American orator Frederick Douglass, who commented on his favorable reception where his race and visage were not issues. From an American tradition bound by slavery, he found himself uninhibited by colour in Irish society.

It was a colourless society, indeed. No colour, no black-and-white, no ambrotype, no glass- or salt-print images of his travels exist. Words painted pictures, or hired portraitists did. As an archivist and collector of early Irish photographs, I began to wonder: could the practice of photography itself have contributed to racism later in the nineteenth century, or later? If there were no images to show what an important person should look like, how did we recognise someone who deserved our notice? How was respect conveyed and displayed in prints made of darkness and light?

When images of Ireland began to emerge from the labs of early photographers, they were mainly of an Anglo-Irish gentry class. As Sean Sexton and Christine Kinealy have noted, we have few pictures of working people in the mid-19th century, because men (usually) who had wealth and leisure to experiment with cameras rarely bothered to capture the labour on their landed estates. One of the earliest images of an Irish labourer—from 1858, a decade after Douglass’s visit—shows a man of ragged clothing and uncertain abode, holding a coin, perhaps in payment for having his image taken. He looks “black” with dirty residue, a stark contrast to the well-lit, carefully posed cartes de visite made of fancier cousins and pretty house doors that featured so in the Victorian age.

It would be back-skewed and nonsensical to suggest that Frederick Douglass was welcomed in Ireland as an equal because Ireland didn’t know what a black man looked like. Nevertheless, it’s not too much to propose that the images we see and receive can frame our expectations. How are people of different races portrayed in Irish images now? The images come at us from all sides, in print and online, but which resonate? Do we see most often the lovely singer Denise Chaila in full power on the Cliffs of Moher, or do we see mothers peeking out from behind curtains of Direct Provision centres? And do our mental pictures reflect the images projected? If we imagine an Asian person in Ireland, do we see the capable Hazel Chu in her mayoral garb, or do we see a Spice Bag takeaway cook? Perhaps we see neither. 

Another question that comes to mind is: Who gets to decide what kind of photos we see? The age of selfies has given a face to women, particularly rural or isolated young women, who would otherwise have only appeared dressed up in holiday snapshots. Their self-made glamour speaks to a new power structure in society—is it for that reason it is often mocked by a social media establishment? What does an old person look like? What does a homeless person’s portrait dignify?

When I muse on Douglass and his struggle for freedom, I wonder: Does it matter who takes our picture? Who is pictured favourably in our world, and how is their image distributed and explored? The worst images of our time inspire violence toward people because of their race. The best inspire kindness and deference.