Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 29 November 2012

“Kieran’s New Book – Cork City Through Time”

On any given day, the city of Cork can be a place of contrasts. For the photographer, these views stop him or her. The bouncing of light off the limestone buildings create a visually bright world where shapes, contours and memories challenge the photographer. The weather in these long winter days can present windswept landscapes through the River Lee valley and blow the citizen off his or her path looking for shelter. In these bleak wintry days, a mist or a sunset can further present colour to this geographically beautiful place.

Cork is rich in traces of its past. The postcards in my new book, co-written with assistant Cork City Museum Curator Dan Breen, is an attempt to illuminate this public past. They show selected sites, primarily public arenas, and the facade of the city one hundred years ago. For the most part the canvas of landscape in one sense remains the same but the way of life has changed. People have been sending, receiving and collecting postcards for well over 150 years. They have always come in a variety of forms including plain, comedic, memorial, and of course topographical. Their popularity reached its zenith in the two decades before the outbreak of World War I when people used postcards for a variety of everyday reasons from ordering shopping to making appointments. Postcards have been described as the ‘social media’ of the Edwardian period as it is estimated that about one billion penny postcards were sold annually in the United States alone between 1907 and 1915.

Since 1992, Cork Public Museum has actively sourced and collected postcards of Cork interest. The majority of postcards are topographical in nature and cover towns and villages throughout County Cork. Presently, their collection numbers in the thousands but they are constantly on the lookout for rarer and more unique examples. This book’s extensive collection of postcards, based on the Museum’s collection, is of times and places in the city, Corkonians are familiar with. There is a power in these images – they all have multiple interpretations; they all show an attempt to come to grips with the place, people and their lives. They are mediums for seeing and finding ways of seeing peoples’ identity. The postcards show people’s relationship to their world – continuity and familiarity crossing past and present. Postcards talk about life – interesting details about life. They record a person, an event, a social phenomenon, and attempt to reconstruct a sense of place. They let moments linger, reflect on the the city as a work of art. Some public spaces are well represented, emphasised and are created and arranged in a sequence to convey particular meanings. Some of the images are rooted in a Victorian landscape, where the local way of life is situated with the Irish nation and the British Empire.

One hundred years ago was a time of change, the continuous rise of an Irish revival, debates over Home Rule and the idea of Irish identity were continuously negotiated by all classes of society. Just like the tinting of the postcards, what the viewer sees is a world which is being contested, refined and reworked. Behind the images presented is a story of change – complex and multi-faceted. The postcards freeze the action, conceptualise society and civil expressions – from the city’s links with the natural world such as rivers and tide to its transportation networks, commerce and social networks. Places of Cork pride, popular culture and heritage, are depicted.

For the photographer it took time patience to set up the picture. One had to wait for the people and the weather to be right; the order and symmetry had to be correct. The gathering of memory, life, energy, and the city’s beat, its light and shape, had to be considered. The tinting or colouring in adds in more subtlety and weight to the image, and adds more to the romanticisation of the landscape. That coupled with the fact that these postcards travelled to different parts of the known world. They are a memory of a place sent to somewhere else, someone reflecting on the person within that world. Some of the postcards have written comments on the back, many commenting on the joy of experiencing and seeing Cork and the region and its fleeting memories. All types of emotion are represented from happiness in visiting Cork to comments on how the addressee was missed.

Dan and I have grouped the postcards under thematic headings like main streets, public buildings, transport, industry and of course sport. The highlight of Edwardian Cork was the hosting of an International Exhibition in 1902 and 1903 and through the souvenir postcards we can get a glimpse of this momentous event. We hope that any reader of this book will not only appreciate how Cork City has evolved and grown over the last century but also how invaluable postcards can be in understanding where we came from.  

Published by Amberley Publishing, UK, Cork City Through Time is available in any good Cork book shop.

Caption:

670a. Front Cover, Cork City Through the Time by Kieran McCarthy & Dan Breen (2012), see www.corkheritage.ie for more info on Kieran’s books.