IT’S AN association that grows old but never fades, an enduring quality that’s passed down the decades and generations and is now over 70 years and counting – it’s the county’s attachment to the work of celebrated photographer Dorothea Lange.

It will be seen this coming Tuesday when ‘70 Years On: Dorothea Lange in County Clare’ comes to Miltown Malbay, a combination of a lecture by Ruairi Ó Conchúir and film presentation of her work, all of which has been facilitated by the Old Kilfarboy Society.

“She was a genius,” her grand-daughter Leslie Dixon, told this writer in 2012 when coming to Clare for a screening of her documentary film ‘Child of Giants’, her father Daniel Dixon’s candid account of the hardship, privations and downright neglect that came with being born the son of two artists – photographer mother Dorothea Lange and painter father Maynard Dixon.

“It seems that nowhere she went did people forget her. Dorothea was a quite memorable individual, with a hypnotic personality. She was small and unassuming and spoke quietly, but very much like a snake charmer she entranced everyone around her. I think there was a force of personal magnetism, not just the work that she left behind.

“This is true of Clare, because after the screening at the ViewFinders Film Festival in the Burren College of Art, there were people there who said that the photographs Dorothea took were the only ones that existed of them as children.

“These were very rural places in poor times and my cynical 16-year-old son got teary-eyed when he was listening to a woman explaining that it was the only photograph of their dead sister. Things like that mean a lot.”

That’s one of Lange’s greatest legacies, with that photograph as important to that Clare family as her era-defining ‘Migrant Mother’ was in highlighting what life was like in the Dustbowl or ‘White Angel Breadline’ was in explaining how things were on the streets of San Francisco at the height of the Great Depression.

“The work always came first,” said Leslie Dixon, “but at what price genius? There are people who see this film, who agree with the choices Dorothea made about her children and think that the art was worth it. There are people who are appalled and think that she’s a monster.

“This is because she boarded my father out when he was seven years of age, so she could take artistic photographs – which, on the one hand, some say she was right to do, since they became some of the most immortal and iconic photos of all time, but she’ll never get that year of her seven-year-old’s life back either. She was taking these photographs of poverty and neglect, while simultaneously ignoring her own son.”

IN 1933 Dorothea Lange was a young portrait photographer with a studio on Union Street in San Francisco. Work in the studio may have paid the bills, but the streets of San Francisco were drawing her.

That’s why one day she left her studio, never really to return. Compelled by the visible human anguish of the Great Depression she trawled through streets and found a food distribution area – a bread line that that had been set up by White Angel, a wealthy woman living in San Francisco.

That day Dorothea Lange took several photographs. But the most telling was the one she labelled “an unshaven, hunched up little man, leaning on a railing with a tin can between his arms, his hands clenched, the line of his mouth bitter, his back turned to those others waiting for a handout”.

Another Great Depression photograph was Migrant Mother. An image that best represented the America of the 1930s as she set out on a journey that eventually brought her to County Clare, where she spent her time on farms and at the fairs, hurling matches, churches, villages, and towns and has left us a remarkable picture of life in Clare in the mid-1950s.

This visit was celebrated by RTÉ’s Nationwide programme in 2005 on the occasion of her son, Daniel Dixon’s, who accompanied his mother to Clare, returned to the county for the first time. Three hundred people turned up at the de Valera Library in Ennis to listen to his and Dorothea’s story by way of an illustrated and carefully scripted audio-visual lecture on life through Lange’s lens.

In Clare, Dorothea took 2,400 photographs, the negatives of were donated to the Oakland Museum in California after her death in 1965. It was there that Galway man Gerry Mullins uncovered them in the early 1990s.

“Who were these people?” I asked myself. “Whatever happened to them? Were they still alive?”

Mullins’ own Clare connections drew him instantly to the documentation of Clare through Lange’s box camera lens and on his return to Ireland a few months later he went to the county with a selection of the photographs.

“With help from a relative in Ennis, I found where some of them had been taken in the town,” he recalled. “On the road out to Miltown Malbay, I found Michael Kenneally in the same house where Dorothea had photographed him. She had obviously liked Michael, and took more photos of him than of any other person in Ireland.”

There was plenty of variety from the market days in Ennis and Ennistymon, farming days, school days, mass days and much more and the find was of such significance that Mullins published them in a book called ‘Dorothea Lange’s Ireland’.

“In her own view,” revealed Mullins, “her work in Clare was among her best. She was clearly interested in people but also in the ritualised comings and goings and people and used this as the theme of her work in Clare.

“She said it was ‘a portrait of the country itself, its population, its customs, its mores, its atmosphere and the texture of its life’. For the rest of her life she kept one or other of her Clare photographs pinned to her studio wall,” he added.

Mullins’ book spawned a new interest in Dorothea Lange’s life and work and in 2001, as did a poignant documentary called ‘Photos to Send’, as film-maker Diedre Lynch retraced Dorothea Lange’s steps in Clare.

“The people I met were extraordinary,” she said, “just beautiful people, who opened their homes and opened their hearts,” she said at a special screening as part of the Ennis Arts Festival.

“To visit people to hear their memories, to hear their stories. You’d hand them a photograph and say ‘tell me about that photograph’ and in that description you could hear and see what had changed and what hadn’t changed,” she added.

“The photographs Dorothea Lange took during her time in Clare have become part of the heritage and history of the county. And that work allowed others to understand her genius,” said Daniel Dixon.

“She looked at and into the people of Clare. These are people of faith, age, strength and eternity. She knew the people because they were rooted in the land and they made her feel at home. These photographs continue to illuminate and inspire,” he added.

“She and my father had a difficult relationship,” revealed Leslie Dixon. “You would never believe my father – a dapper gentleman who came to see you in Ireland – was a homeless bum living on rooftops, hiding in the library to stay warm, which is how he got an education because they forced you to read or else they kicked you out. He stole my grandmother’s cameras and pawned them because he needed the money, but partly to get back at her.”

Ireland became part of that relationship in 1954, what Leslie Dixon calls “the final block of cement in the structure of the new relationship that was going to be one of tremendous mutual respect and admiration, trust and the possibility of rediscovering love”.

That’s why Leslie Dixon followed the path of her father and grandmother by coming here, in celebration of Clare’s part in the Dorothea Lange story and her father’s story.

“I now feel closer and part of that,” she said. “When she came into my life, she had already battled chronic illness. She had already seen mortality in the face; she had already been through and come out the other end of extreme difficulties raising my father and I think she was ready to stop fighting and start enjoying life she really enjoyed her time in Ireland, as did my father,” she added.

DOROTHEA Lange was drawn to Clare through the work of Harvard scholar Conrad Arensberg who lived in Luogh near Doolin from 1932 to ’34 just to experience what rural Irish life was like.

Arensberg’s experience became The Irish Countryman, a celebrated anthropological study that painted word pictures of the social and economic traditions of rural living.

Two decades later went down the same road to put photography to Arensberg’s words. She arrived in Ennis on September 4, 1954 and checked into the Old Ground Hotel.

At the time Ennis’ population was 7,000, while it had 65 public houses and dozens of local businesses. She used the town as her base and travelled to towns and villages throughout the county.

She captured images of old Ireland that were contained in a photo essay in Life Magazine entitled ‘Irish Country’. The feature was flagged beside cover girl Sheree North and then on the inside cover it was described as “a sympathetic look at the parent stock of a fat-flung race as it lives on calmly amid the culture of a bygone day”.

However, Lange was less than pleased with Life Magazine’s treatment of her work — only 19 of her photographs were used while much of the narrative to go with the essay written by her son Daniel Dixon was excluded.

Still, for Lange, who was 59 years of age at the time, it was a voyage of discovery that remained with her and had started after she walked into the photography shop owned and operated by Denis Wylde in the Market area of Ennis.

She went to Denis, who was the longtime Clare Champion photographer, because of some problem with her camera and left with everything in order, and more importantly, armed with some local knowledge.

“Dorothea asked Denis whether he had recently taken any passport photographs for people about to emigrate,” recalled Robert Tottenham from Mount Callan in 2004.

“Denis told them about Maureen and Catherine O’Halloran who were going to America later in that year. Maureen was working for me at the time and that’s why Dorothea came here.

“When she came around we didn’t take much notice of her. We just carried on with our work because we got used to having her around. If she had come two years earlier she would have got pictures of us using horses and carts. It was a pity for her that the tractor had taken over and that day was gone.”

Some things stay the same though — one of the photographs was of Robert Tottenham sitting on his living room couch looking over some family documents — the same couch he sat on 50 years later.

This sense of things never changing was also experienced a few miles down the road in Michael Kenneally’s house, where Dorothea Lange also visited in September 1954.

Her portraits on the farm and three-room cottage near Clounanaha that the then 19-year-old Michael shared with his mother Nora in 1954 were brought to life once more 50 years later.

“This woman passed and she had a camera,” recalled Michael. “She just came up the avenue and I can picture it as if it was only yesterday. She asked me my name and age.

“She had turned in the cross by accident and gone up to our house. My mother was there and invited her inside, that’s how she came to take all the photographs.”

At the open-hearthed fire, Nora made slammy cakes and tea for her guest. They talked by the fireside for hours on end about Ireland and its way of life.

“What do you think of Ireland,” Nora enquired. “It’s what we call a plain country, still quite happy. It’s what one is used to,” she added.

“There was a grand picture of myself grabbing a hold of a pony to go to work,” recalled Michael with pride. “There was another one taken of me with my back to the house and the hill.

“It was exactly here,” he revealed 50 years to the month. “This is where Dorothea took that picture I’m talking about. The field you see there is the same as it was back then,” he added, as he posed for the same photograph, while claiming to be wearing the same hat.

“She was a lovely woman and we enjoyed having her around. It was the same a few years ago when Dierdre Lynch was around making her documentary about Dorothea’s photographs. I was out on my bicycle and this woman came up the avenue. It was like when Dorothea came up the avenue.”

GERRY MULLINS’ book ‘Dorothea Lange’s Ireland’ was published to great acclaim in 1996 and became a best seller in Clare and well beyond and has long since been out of print.

The same year Cork-born BBC journalist Fergal Keane’s ‘Letter to Daniel’ was published — the book was an emotional message to his newborn son and also became a best seller and travelled around the world.

One day it landed in the Missionary Sisters of Holy Rosary in Zambia where Sister Mary Rose Crowe was working as a coordinator for development and at the time was involved in the establishment of centre for Rwandan refugees in Lusaka.

“There was this picture of a child that looked so like me. I kept looking at the cover over and over again saying ‘that child looks so like me’, is it me?’ I went around to others and told them what I thought but then I dismissed the idea.

“I thought it was a boy because of the reference to Fergal’s son Daniel in the title of the book. Then I finally put the book to one side and said he was probably a Polish boy. I thought no more about it,” she added.

It wasn’t until she came back home to her native Crusheen on her holidays that it all came back, when her brother Edmond brought her back to September 1954 when she was just four years of age.

“He said to me, ‘there’s a book going around and you’re in it’,” she revealed 50 years after he photograph was taken by Dorothea Lange.

“He brought Dorothea Lange’s book home to Crusheen and it was then I realised it was the same photograph that was in Fergal Keane’s book. That confirmed what I thought when I first saw Fergal’s book – it was me.

“I was always going to matches with him every Sunday. My mother had died the year before and it was important for him to have a hold on me, making sure I was ok.”

Mary Rose was photographed in Dr Daly Park in Tulla in September 1954, as was her brother Terence, as Michael Conway watched a couple of county finals — Killaloe played Ennis Dals at minor level while the Junior A decider was between Parteen and O’Briensbridge.

“We were never aware the photographs were being taken,” revealed Mary Rose, some that repeated itself 47 years later when she was at another hurling match with her father. This time Mary Rose was taking care of her father in Cusack Park.

“The Clare Champion’s John Kelly came over during the match and asked us our names. He told me he had taken a photograph and he’d like to publish it, “ she recalled.

“But I phoned him during the week and asked him not to publish it because I was afraid that my father would get disheartened if he thought he didn’t look well.”

It was left at that and in November 2003 Michael Crowe passed away. The following year Mary Rose thought of that photograph that was never published in The Clare Champion.

“I phoned John and he managed to retrieve a copy of the photograph. It was an extraordinary coincidence — both photos are at hurling matches and both have the hands as the central theme and the element of looking after and caring. It’s a lovely story.”

One of the many, many stories to emerge from Dorothea Lange’s time in Ireland in September/October 1954.

’70 Years On: Dorothea Lange in County Clare’ — lecture by Ruairí Ó Conchúir for the Old Kilfarboy Society will take place in The Malbay, Miltown Malbay, on Tuesday, March 11, at 8pm.