Jane W. Shackleton’s Ireland

In the late 19th-century, Shackleton (1843–1909) toured parts of her native Ireland, capturing in frequently excellent photographs its people, landscape, and history, from millworkers in industrial communities outside Dublin to the craggy villages and ruins of Inis Mór. Married to Joseph F. Shackleton, she took up photography in the mid-1880s, processing her negatives near one of the family-operated mills around Lucan. By the time she died, Shackleton had collected more photos of Ireland than almost any other woman of the period. The photos compiled by Corlett, an archeologist, amount to a substantial record of Irish people and places at the turn of the century: boys stand outside an ivy-covered stone church in Kells; an old Gypsy woman tugs at her performing monkey’s chain-leash; thin silhouettes drift along the desolate streets of Mountmellick. Fascinated with archeology and a member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Shackleton shot photos of historic and archeological sites that vividly set local people against the ruins: a little girl sits among the corroded grandeur of Sligo Abbey; women dressed in black stand by Dun Aengus’s dazzling pale stones. Accompanying the photos are captions outlining local and family history, as well as excerpts from Shackleton’s lectures. However, the introduction, brief and bogged down in family history and genealogy, might have better served the photos. (Mar.)