Building Resistance, Photographing Dissent

Abstract

In early 1890, Robert French took a series of photographs of New Tipperary, in southern Ireland. The town was newly built for hundreds of tenants from the Smith-Barry estate, who left their homes, businesses and farms during conflict with the landlord. The centerpiece of the new town’s architecture was a shopping arcade, which included a covered market space. French’s images of the new town represent an intersection between architectural, political and national discourses. Each photographic image exists as commodity and as visual representation. This unstable double function is the point of departure for this paper, which elaborates on this schema using French’s New Tipperary images –and proposes some productive ways in which the images can be understood. When the New Tipperary project ran out of funds and ultimately failed in 1892, the arcade was demolished. French’s photographs remain as spectral manifestations of its architecture as political resistance.