Evelyn Hofer: Dublin's Haunted Hearts

 
Past town, the Liffey breaks from iron into grass,

Then wanders, with the swans preening

In the shaken warmth of early March

And white abandoned seabirds leaning

On the wind.  A cat steps cautiously

Among the daffodils.  Under a tree

An old man contemplates his shoe,

Or turns to what he never thought to see

Again, the water fretted by a cygnet's thrust.

Look well.  Further beyond that river bend

Are spaces teemed with cities which must

Strike a destiny.  But here for aimless miles

The river flattens to the land.

 -          The Liffey Beyond  Islandbridge from 23 Poems by Eavan Boland, Dublin, Gallagher Press: 1962.

A photograph of the poet Eavan Boland, age 21, was included in the book Dublin: A Portrait by V.S. Pritchett & Evelyn Hofer (New York, Harper & Row: 1967, London: 1966)

When Evelyn Hofer and V.S. Pritchett agreed to collaborate on a book about Dublin in 1965, it was the third project in as many years that the German-born photographer and the British writer had worked on.  The first was London Perceived, published in 1962  but it turned out that Dublin: A Portrait was the charmed work.  Not that the two of them brought identical approaches to bear.

 In January of 1966, when she had completed most of the photographs, Hofer wrote to Pritchett:   “You and so many others say that Dublin is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe – this, from the very beginning, I never felt….However – I found the people much more fascinating – and have taken a great deal of portraits and have perhaps come closer to them than in any of the other books.” 

Pritchett's reply: “I am very eager to see your pictures as I am sure they will be the making of the book and give it the sense of Irish people which I find so difficult in writing.  I feel they are all whispering around me.”  What they had become  was perfect complements for each other.

“.(H)ow much is hidden by the neglect of appearance..” Pritchett would write in Dublin, intuiting the loss and hatred that lay under the surface of everyday life - John Masefield's "worlds of pain."  How the statue of William of Orange outside Trinity College became the occasion for Protestants and Catholics to rehearse the grievances of 1690, when the Protestant king had subdued the locals in the Battle of the Boyne.  The students took turns festooning William's memorial with lilies on the oe side and defacing it on the other. It was dynamited in 1836 but the pieces were gathered up and, unlike Humpty Dumpty, put back together again.  It was finally blown up for good in 1929; the pieces were smelted down, but not before someone had made off with the head.  Further than that, Pritchett was convinced that the entire James family, including Henry, William, and Alice, inherited their spiritual horror – or sense of vastation – from their Irish ancestors.  In support, he points to the Gothic horror  stories of Joseph Le Fanu.

 

Consider the children gathered for their picture front of the monument, dressed for play, on a cold day, The little red-haired girl standing at right in a green coat is holding on to her collie dog, all stand quietly at least for the moment that the photographer had waited for.  On this winter day the Coombe looks such a quiet place but like every street in this old city, it has its history.   This had been the place where the French Huguenots caused Flemish weavers sought refuge from..... They were not welcomed.   Brutal riots ensued, the Irish butchers cut the leg tendons of the immigrant weavers, who retaliated by hanging butchers by the jaws of their own meat hooks.  There is a Gothic element running through Irish history, recounted with evident relish by Pritchett in the following anecdote: Sir John Mahaffy of Trinity College,  on being told that one of his enemies was ill,  remarked, “Nothing trivial,  I hope.”

Segregation of the sexes was finally showing cracks in the 1960s when Pritchett gave the locals'  reaction to Hofer as a photographer: “To a professional photographer, a woman, it is suggested  with immense circumlocution and tact that it would 'look better' if she explained she did not earn her living in this way, but took photographs for pin money.”

But Hofer was no ordinary documentary photographer, having no need to make the quick candid shots that became, of necessity, the prevailing mode during the previous decades of war.  Hofer would wait patiently for the moments when  some“inside value, some interior respect” became visible in her human subjects.  In her group photographs each individual gets her/his due.  The three gravediggers have cocked their hats to their individual preference; Anna and Emma, the two chambermaids, one older and in sensible shoes, one younger with lace frills at collar and cuffs.  Even the architecture in Hofer's photographs appears stripped of the  superfluous.  Essence is all. And there were those who noticed the difference.  Hofer contributed several memorable images to Mary McCarthy's travel book The Stones of Florence (1959). She was also among the first fine art photographers in the early 1960s to use color film.  The Dublin book was the first project where she included both media in one project.

During her long career, Hofer's work attracted only modest notice from critics and curators and was never the subject of a museum show in the United States. In 1994 the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, presented a Hofer retrospective, The Universal Eye. 

Evelyn Hofer was born in Marburg, Germany in 1922 and died in Mexico City in 2009.

 

First published in the 1950s and 1960s, the stories of Maeve Brennan form a kind of back story to Hofer’s Dublin photographs.  A native of Dublin, Maeve Brennan was born in 1917, leaving at age 17 when her father was appointed to a diplomatic post in Washington, D.C.  Eventually Brennan  became a staff writer at The New Yorker where the stories included in The Springs of Affection appeared.   A selection of Brennan's Dublin stories was published after her death in 1993.   Where Pritchett wrote about Dublin as the outsider he was, Hofer, ever attentive and subtle, seemed able to enter into the people and places she photographed.  Several of Brennan's stories take place in the fictional neighborhood of Ranelagh, a place of brick row houses where the residents are penurious but proud.  ''Our street was called an avenue, because it was blind at one end, the farthest end from us,'' the narrator recalls.  

(The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin by Maeve Brennan, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company: 1997.)

Images:

All photographs are from  Dublin: A Portrait by V.S. Pritchett, with photographs by Evelyn Hofer, New York, Harper & Row: 1967 (1966).

1. Dublin Sky.
2. The Coombe (street)
3. Huband Bridge.
4. Distillery.
5. Mods.
6. Anna and Emma.
7. Seminaries.
8. Grave diggers.