As with slow food, there’s a lot to be said for slow photography. Saturated by the sleek, glossy imagery of consumption, we are often unable nowadays to appreciate many of the things that make a difference to the quality of our lives: the unspectacular, utilitarian and occasionally ugly infrastructure that makes living in this time and place so comfortable.
That is the remarkable achievement of Place of Work, a modest exhibition of photographs by the architectural photographer Ros Kavanagh, on display in Dublin to mark the 175th anniversary of the Office of Public Works (OPW). It makes the neglected visible once more.
When we think of the OPW, we immediately picture the official Ireland of great public buildings, monuments and places for which it is responsible, such as Dail Eireann, the Custom House, the Four Courts, Dublin Castle, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Newgrange, Skellig Michael, the Rock of Cashel, Phoenix Park and St Stephen’s Green in Dublin.
We celebrate the world-class restoration of the Curvilinear Range and the great palm house at the National Botanic Gardens, criticise the heavy hand the OPW often brings to contemporary architectural design, and condemn the rash of inappropriate visitor centres that scarred some of our most sensitive rural locations in the 1980s and 1990s.
But many of the OPW’s achievements in promoting Ireland’s rational economic development have been largely forgotten, including the co-ordination of our railway network, planning for the generation of water power and electricity at Clonlara on the River Shannon, and the first runways and airport buildings in the country.
From its inception in 1831, the Board of Works, as it was then called, helped to shape Ireland. It carried out the main infrastructural developments of the 19th century; roads, bridges and water supplies, as well as harbours and piers to encourage sea fishing. After 1922, when it became known as the OPW, it repaired state buildings damaged during the war of independence and the civil war, and built the country’s schools, garda stations, courthouses, coastguard stations and post offices.
The Galway historian Niall O Ciosain says the OPW became the instrument for the “all-pervasive role of the state in everyday life”. Its impact was such that, even by 1868, The Times had described Ireland as being “governed by the police and the Board of Works”.
The most dramatic example of its influence came during the early years of the famine, when the Board of Works was responsible for the main relief schemes, essentially road and pier building.
Angela Rolfe, an architect with the OPW, says the thrust of the anniversary celebrations is “to highlight our legacy after decentralisation, by focusing on people rather than projects . . . to review who, and what, we are. Engineering was the elite profession of the 19th century”.
When she commissioned Kavanagh’s photographic project last April, Rolfe encouraged him to record how he would be met on his travels throughout Ireland. “I believed the goodwill towards the OPW’s legacy was still there. That’s what I had hoped for and it came through.”
The commission started with a list of 3,300 projects completed since 1831, including bridges, prisons and lunatic asylums, colleges, RIC barracks and garda stations, and railway projects. National monuments were not included.
Kavanagh entered them all into a database, catalogued by decade, type and county; the barest of information, but with such a large number to assess, perhaps not a bad thing. “It provided a useful overview of trends during the past 175 years,” he says. “I was struck by how the landscape is literally embedded with public works that underpin our progress as a society. I wanted to show this by photographing each project rooted in its surroundings.”
He photographed four projects from each decade and then narrowed it down to one or two per decade for the exhibition. This meant about 70 examples had to be selected. “I had no idea if the projects were still extant or if they had been altered over the years, but I liked the element of risk,” he says. There was always the possibility that a project, long gone or demolished, might still make for a good image or an interesting story.
“When the OPW saw my list it said: ‘Some of these don’t pass the John Hinde test.’ But the OPW is involved with small things as well as large things. It’s not all glamorous,” he says. Kavanagh was asked to add the Rock of Cashel, Dublin airport and Farmleigh, among others, to his list. Most are not in the exhibition, however.
Among the notable images are those of the empty site in Limerick where Ballingarry Roman Catholic chapel (1841) once stood; the garden in Irvinestown, Co Fermanagh, that conceals the disused holding tank for the town’s water supply (1878); the Kells viaduct on the Killorglin-Valentia light railway in Co Kerry (1893), closed since the 1960s; the abandoned, bunker-like wireless telegraphy station in Bunbeg, Co Donegal (1912); and Athlone’s high-power wireless station (1933), intended (but never used) for short-wave broadcasts to America.
Standard commercial architectural shots are taken head-on and aim — in a doomed effort to defeat the ravages of time — to describe the entirety of a brand- new building in a single photograph. In contrast, the images in Place of Work are taken obliquely, looking across the subject, which occupies the middle distance, in the landscape. The portrait format of the photographs has the effect of creating a strong foreground.
“I’m pretty deadpan in the way I photograph,” says Kavanagh, who is also a trained architect. “I like working with geometry in the image. I try to provide a sense of journey from foreground to background: a zigzag route which goes across the photo. There’s generally an escape in the route: the sense of movement goes beyond the frame. Its purpose is to take you out of the photo, to suggest that there are further possibilities.”
Kavanagh wanted to include an image of OPW personnel at work, to show us the faces of some of those who created this legacy on our behalf. He hoped to find a photograph from the 19th century. Instead, all he turned up was an office interior from 1975. The backs of the anonymous individuals are turned to the camera. There is not a computer in sight. The draughting machines, obsolete in today’s design studios, would not look unfamiliar to the men who founded the OPW.
In the corner is a poster from European Architectural Heritage Year. It reads: “A future for our past”. As the OPW prepares for decentralisation from St Stephen’s Green in 2008 and likely fragmentation in the towns of Trim, Claremorris and Kanturk, let us hope that there is.
Place of Work: A Journey Through 175 Years of the Office of Public Works, until August 10 at OPW Atrium, 51 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin
