Ireland: 1998 and 2024
My attachment to Ireland began in 1998. For the next four years it grew into a consuming artistic and cultural passion. I stumbled across the Cuckoo Fleadh in Kinvara on that first trip, and I became transfixed by the music. My B&B lady in Kilfenora took me to my first set dance at Vaughan’s Barn, and I became a regular in the scene, that ”Yank who could dance.” And those landscape of the West, what is now branded as “The Wild Atlantic Way,” I couldn’t get enough of it.
I photographed all over the country in multiple trips in all seasons (though mostly in the winter when flights were cheap). In black and white and with a panoramic format camera. It became the deepest creative immersion of my photographic life. I showed the work at portfolio reviews, I got some shows and some reviews, even one in Ireland, and I started working with a book packager on a book of my photographs, and I was starting to get some interest from publishers. I even got a solo show of the work in a Soho gallery in New York. It was a career defining time in my life, it felt like.
Then 9/11 happened. Interest in the book evaporated. My New York show opened four months later, in January, 2002. Not a single image sold. The gallery closed within the year. It seemed the door had clearly closed on this project and on my ambition to be a fine art photographer. I didn’t return to Ireland for another 22 years.
A few years ago a dance researcher in Ireland, Stephanie Marbach, stumbled on my Ireland work online, and wrote me with great excitement. She recognized that I had documented a dance scene at a particular time in Irish history, and she connected me with the director of the National Dance Archive of Ireland, Catherine Foley. They were very interested in collecting my work. In March I brought a stack of exhibit prints to their archive at the University of Limerick. And so that’s how I allowed Ireland back into my life.
In my two weeks there I began to reconnect with the Ireland I remembered and the Ireland of today. I reconnected with some the people I knew then, but I had a new relationship to the music. This time I wasn’t only an observer, as I played and I sat in on sessions. I roamed the same countryside that I had hiked in 25 years earlier. I stayed entirely within Clare and I wandered mostly across The Burren, and sometimes visited the very same rocks I photographed then. This calendar is a reminder of the unchanging nature of a place, an amalgam of my memory and my life in the current moment, as I found it in the landscape and the music.
Technical notes: Most of the photographs are shot on black and white film (Neopan Acros or Kodak Tmax 3200) with an Olympus OM-2. A few of them are conversions from digital captures.
Doug Plummer
Seattle, WA
About Doug Plummer
Selfie at Cliffs of Moher
Doug has been taking photos literally his entire lifetime, and he has had a long, successful career photographing for magazines, corporations, and institutions for over 35 years. He has a strong visual sensibility grounded in authentic documentary seeing, as well as a body of fine art landscape photography that has had a long exhibit history. Doug is also a musician and contra dancer, and served on the board of the Country Dance and Song Society from 2015 to 2021. He lives in Seattle’s Bryant neighborhood with his wife Robin, where they host music jams and house concerts.