Absent without Leave: Photography, Loss and ‘Tin-town’
Luke Gibbons
Margo McNulty’s photographs are also drawn to the cast-offs of history, or at least the official histories of the state. In early 1940, the dilapidated old army camp known as ‘Tin-town’ at the Curragh was requisitioned for the internment of over 1000 Republican prisoners, incarcerated in draughty wooden huts exposed to the elements, and the seeping damp of the surrounding muddy fields. In the photo-etching ’Legacy,’ a bleak landscape is divided into nine-panels, suggesting a view through a window. The panels are also time-capsules of a kind, intimating different layers of human presence or intervention in the scene. In the foreground, there are water-logged tracks of seemingly heavy vehicles, cutting arcs across the lines of vision and leading out of the frame, but in the mid-ground the land has already erased recent memory, though ditches, farm-houses, and trees on the horizon still testify to a human hand. In the farthest vista, there is no land at all, only that unbroken expanse ‘which prisoners call the sky’ – a glimpse perhaps of the future rather than the past, a dawn of unattainable freedom.
In a related photograph, ‘21-Tintown’ the removal of the latticed window frame has the effect of accosting the spectator as the water-logged ground, this time scored with tracks that suggest vanished buildings, encroaches on the eye. The waste-land offers no respire as it rises in the frame, leaving only a sliver of slate gray sky. In another image, a black swathe of shadow engulfs the foreground much like the somber masses of colour that often weigh down a Mark Rothko painting, except in this image there is depth of field, as a mound of trees – akin to a fairy fort - on a hillock in the distance catches the light. It is difficult not to think of space becoming time once more, the shadows lifting in the distant clearing but not, one suspects, for many of the inmates who stared at these landscapes from the camps.
Margo McNulty’s images of the Curragh come across as landscapes of bare life, which is to say that they are not landscapes at all but ‘mere terrain,’ as Walter Benjamin described the battlefields left behind by the Great War. The bleak topography testifies not only to present day absences but to an emptiness that was pervasive when the huts were visible and fully populated (over 2000 passed through the camp). In one photo, the sharp contrasts facilitated by photo-etching accentuate the declivity of a trench carved into the land, as if the land is divided against itself. This is offset by the fine-point precision of a tree standing like a sentinel to the right, its shadow resembling a muddy surface on the ground, There is a sense of an off-stage presence, and in another picture a tree is out of frame itself, casting the tracery of its branches onto a gable wall. In a related photograph, a similar gable wall is clad in galvanized iron, an image of the cold comfort and uniformity of ‘Tin-town’ itself. The anonymity of such scenes suggest sites of trauma and suffering, a placelessness that resists integration into readily available narratives of the nation, still less heroic pasts.
The Fianna Fáil government under de Valera justified the mass incarceration of Republicans on the grounds that they represented a threat to the state and Irish neutrality during the war, but the tragic irony was that members of the government had fought and suffered for the same ideals: the Minister for Justice, Gerry Boland, was in the Curragh when he was elected to the Dáil in 1923. It is perhaps for this reason that the scenes seem to return the gaze and are divided against themselves: this was the fate of Irish people themselves, as they turned away from their own haunted self images in successive generations.
Unlike conventional landscapes, these scenes are not to be looked at but give the impression of looking back: those who inhabited it were under constant surveillance, as if spectators themselves were the objects of vision. Rather than being aesthetically pleasing, the images evoke reproach and guilt: it is the Irish viewer that is put on the spot, for the suffering that took place there was done in the name of the nation.
Luke Gibbons (author of Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland Modernism, and Memory)