DENNIS DINNEEN

There are many tales in Ireland of hidden worlds and distant lands.

As an island nation its part of the heritage. On the land heroes are buried deep down under the hills. Temporal places where no one grows old yet curses persist have been navigated from the land. Saints were sailors and scholars were exiles. The sea that surrounds protected and supplied, while also delivering the enemies that would invade and supplant. Ireland is a supernatural place. Every atom of the land is impregnated with poetic contradictions of a kind that only seem to exist elsewhere in theoretical physics.

For in the Gaelic imagination what is present can also be past and future and this is not considered unnatural. It is the Gaelic language and it is life. What is dangerous is liberating, what is soft is devious, what is familiar is death. The Gaelic appreciation for paradoxical entanglement is a philosophy all of its own. It affects speech, attitude and vision. The Irish have not been governed well and don’t govern well, because at the heart of every Gael is a hidden world of two bulls fighting in the pouring rain. You can call it myth, you can call it madness, but what you can’t call it is ordinary.

The rolling parade of faces that line the pages of the book Small Town Portraits are not to be forgotten. Each character seems to have been pulled from their respective tale to be captured for a moment in a bright flash of light: their shifting positions and strong shadow cast against a close backdrop adds to a feeling of confined fleetingness. The soft wide eyes of some contrast with the intensely hunched shoulders of others, while the sad expressions of the young and the old hint at a loss that memory can’t console. Just who is enticing these poor mythological creatures from the haven of their secret narratives is unclear – the one who captures is never spied – but he is known by name: Dennis Dinneen.

For each of the photographed in Small Town Portraits there is a moment of total stillness and a flicker of stoic life. It is a talent bestowed on a great photographer to capture that uncanny detail. It’s as though each picture is a eulogy, and belying this is a Shakespearian soliloquy where life’s performance on the stage of mortality runs throughout.

There is the cast of sole individuals sitting for their driving licence photograph. The white backdrop is revealed and the flash freezes the scene. The shock of the bulb stuns a few. There are some curious sequences when the sitter appears in various poses as though they have entered into a collaborative play with the photographer, a phone becomes a prop and positions are tested. In other pictures a withering assistant is called upon to manually hoist the backdrop. The reluctance of the scene completed by half-smoked cigarette remaining in hand. That cigarette is a memento mori.

Each slightly unbalanced frame is a fraction of a naturally uneven life and flash of an experience somewhere in the nether. There’s a touch of chance that flitters between accident and spur-of-the-moment decision that radiates from each small square. More often than not, the pictures in this book were intended to be cropped, so what is seen is usually an attention to a single point rather than the mise-en-scène.

In contrast to the jack-the-lads and jacketed men with piercing eyes and hardened expressions are the women. Some are attractive young ladies; some are mothers starting on their journey with hope in their eyes, while others are sisters, daughters and friends. Some are older and look exhausted after a life of God-knows-what hardship. This portrait is just another thing for them to do. Sympathy befalls many of the women who sit with their husbands, families and alone.

Vladimir and Estragon make cameos, as does a boy with a fox cub, a fragile symbol of Ireland’s depleting wildness as the modernising age rolls in. Friends in high spirits tumble along, some with bare chest exposed, while among the schoolgirl dancers are odd players like the skeleton child and the American cowboy. There is an older man with a dusty jacket and rocket launcher resting on his shoulder, reappearing later as a boy with a toy shotgun. This couplet suggests Macroom’s warring history from Gaelic clan to IRA insurrection against the British colonisers. The small town’s castle walls remain today as a permanent reminder of that bloody history.

As there are singles and double acts there is a recurring family trinity. This trinity is interesting as it suggests the Sacred Family and Holy Trinity of Roman Catholicism. However the expressions and the clothes as well, are reminiscent of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Where his scrutinising cusp-of-modernity double portrait stares deep into a dusty corner of American psyche, so too do these triple portraits of Dinneen’s stare into Ireland’s dark reaches. 

What links the two is the creation of ambiguity by carefully balancing hard reality with symbolic mythology. For Wood, he chose not to use the fuming factories of Chicago or the Art Deco artifice of New York, but Iowa in the weathered Midwest. The often-overlooked heartland of the American dream is not too far removed from County Cork, or indeed Munster in general, as the Irish equivalent. Both rural landscapes harbour the nightmares of blood-soaked soil and hard labour derived from conquest and expansion, self-determination and redemption.

In American Gothic the trinity is ever-present. In the top half of the painting the roof of the Carpenter Gothic-style house forms an apex of a compositional triangle with the figures at base. Within that triangle is the triangular window, and within that are triangular shapes. These continue to the smallest at the base of the net curtain. That net curtain is a veil, separating us mortals from some unknown void beyond. The house represents the religious fervour in which the American expansion westward has been held in the cultural psyche.

In the lower half of Wood’s painting, the trinity is observed in a second fashion as a Sacred Family. However, where there would usually stand a child to form the family triangle there now stands a trident pitchfork. This tool is symbolic of sacrifice and the hard work put into the land on which the homestead stands. Just as a child would continue the familial line, the land becomes a surrogate. As the window frame casts a shadow on the net curtain above, so too does the pitchfork below in the workwear of the male figure.

Intended or not, Dinneen seems to have captured this layering of compositional narrative and symbolism with his own family portrait. Indeed, the patriarch even seems to have stepped from one into the other. From the slightly angled heads to the thick winter coats, withholding expressions and the crude domestic backdrop concealing a door to some unknown place, Dinneen’s Holy Trinity at once refers to Catholic repression and a sense of forced leaving. Ireland still suffers from an epidemic of emigration to this day. Unlike the openness of Wood’s painting, Dinneen’s is claustrophobic, more akin to an Irish feeling of walled defensiveness.