A girl perched in a windowsill, peers down at her needlework. The soft light rests on her long hair and the fabric she examines (Fig. 1). This image is of a daughter, taken by her mother. A different photograph shows a young woman, barefoot on a country path. Standing beside a donkey, she grasps one of two baskets of turf ladened on its back (Fig.2). This is an image of a worker, taken by a landowner. Both were captured by Mary Alice Young (1867-1954), and among the forty-eight boxes of glass negatives, taken by the photographer, carefully stored in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI).^[1]

Ireland has a rich photographic history, and museums and archives around the country have, in recent years, been committed to digitising lens-based collections to enhance public access and preservation. Among this growing corpus of online imagery, few digitised photographic collections were created by women or at least attributed to them. In 2020, PRONI embarked on the largest restoration and digitisation project of a woman’s photographic archive to date on the Island. The collection was that of Mary Alice Young, of Galgorm Castle and Estate, Ballymena. Working in partnership with Mid-and East Antrim Borough Council and the photographer’s family, the project endeavoured to catalogue, restore and digitise Young’s photographic negatives for public access. The project also culminated into a travelling exhibition. It initially launched in the Braid Museum, located in Young’s homeland of Ballymoney, before its display in PRONI, and museums and libraries across Northern Ireland in 2022. Young’s collection brings a refreshing contribution to the dearth of Irish women’s photography available for public view. We should, however, be wary of ascribing trouble-free narratives to this collection.

Mary Alice was born in Co. Antrim in 1867, the daughter of Sir Francis Edmund Workman-Macnaghten, 3rd Baronet. Her wealth, status and position in Ulster’s gentry was further consolidated through her marriage in 1893. Her Husband William, known as Willie Young, was the heir of Galgorm Castle and Estate in Ballymena, Co. Antrim, and his merchant family had accumulated their wealth from Ulster’s booming linen trade. Between 1890 and 1915, Mary Alice Young took over a thousand photographs.^[2] The majority of these were taken at Galgorm, recording the interior of her home, her friends and family, as well as agricultural labourers working on the estate.

Images within Young’s surviving photographic corpus fall loosely into three categories: artistic portraiture, snapshots of gentry life, and images of rural labour. Young most likely utilised and circulated these images in different ways, like many women of her class from the period, compiling albums or sharing these images with family and friends. Pictorial depictions of individuals employed in the Galgorm estate are akin to those popular with the tourist market from the period, showing ‘Irish types’. Contrastingly, many of her posed images of children in the family are mirror the work of Julia Margaret Cameron for instance. The Mary Alice Young archive, like the photographer’s identity, is complex, multifaceted and, at times, contradictory. While it is easy to centre the photographer’s gender identity, and celebrate the representation it brings within Irish archives, we must acknowledge the complexity of class, power and politics in Young’s gaze and work. The two opening images sit in striking contrast. Both are captured loosely in Young’s ‘domestic’ sphere of the Galgorm estate, and are of women and girls, taken by a female photographer. However, our readings of these images must acknowledge a spectrum of positionality embodied by Young when she captured and circulated images, and how this constantly shifts across the photographic corpus. While Young was a woman, she was a wealthy one, operating within many layers of privilege in Ulster’s Anglo-Irish gentry. Irish women’s photographic collections are significant in largely androcentric Irish archives. The Young collection is a reminder, however, that providing ‘representation’ is not their sole purpose. Women, their archives and their ‘representation’ are just just like the history they record – complex.

Fig. 1 Mary Alice Young, ‘Photograph of a Hilda Grace Young seated at a window [possibly at Galgorm Castle] and doing needlework with her work basket by her side’ D3027/8/C/25/16 (PRONI).

Fig. 2 Mary Alice Young, ‘Photograph of a donkey with turf creels’ D3027/8/C/10/18 (PRONI).

Special thanks to the Deputy Keeper of the Records, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for access for permission to use the images featured.

Biography

Lucy Wray is a historian of Ireland, and Britain, specialising in visual culture. Currently based at the University of Bristol, Lucy is a Senior Research Associate working on the AHRC project, ‘Mariners: Religion, race and empire in British ports, 1801-1914’. Lucy is continuously engaged in public history. She was recently awarded a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant to support her exhibition ‘Faces of the Irish Diaspora’ in Bristol. It showcases the diverse experiences of the Irish community in the city through photographic portraits. You can read more about it here.

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[1] D3027/8/C (PRONI).

[2] Brian Mercer Walker, Shadows on glass: a portfolio of early Ulster Photography (Belfast, 1977) p. 8.