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Frank Stephens – a photographic archive

TCD MS 10842/1/9 ‘Weaving crios (belt) Aran 1928’. This image was probably taken on Inis Meáin, the middle of the three Aran Islands. The woman weaving the crios, which appears to be attached to her left foot, is wearing pampooties.
TCD MS 10842/1/9 ‘Weaving crios (belt) Aran 1928’.
This image was probably taken on Inis Meáin, the middle of the three Aran Islands. The woman weaving the crios, which appears to be attached to her left foot, is wearing pampooties.

Francis Edmund (Frank) Stephens was born in Rathgar, Dublin in November 1884, eldest son of solicitor Henry (Harry) Francis Colcough Stephens and his wife Annie Isabella, née Synge, sister of the playwright John Millington Synge. The Synge family connection was a powerful and formative influence on Frank Stephens. The two families lived in adjoining houses in south Dublin from the time of the Stephens’s marriage in 1884 until shortly before J M Synge’s death in 1909.  Even summer holidays were spent together in various rented houses in Co Wicklow, notably in the seaside village of Greystones and further inland at Castle Kevin. This close proximity meant that from an early age Frank was exposed to his Uncle John’s interests in natural history, music, Irish language, Celtic antiquities and ancient Irish monuments. They also shared a mutual interest in photography, a popular hobby in the Stephens/Synge social circle at this period particularly for Frank and his younger brother Edward.

TCD MS 10842/1/13 ‘Cottage. Aran Is/ Fish drying on roof/ September 1935’. [Location on Inis Mór, Oileáin Árann]. Surplus fish were cleaned in fresh water, salted and then left on walls or thatched roofs to dry. The fish had to be retrieved every night, and also if there was a shower of rain, in order to dry them properly for storing.
TCD MS 10842/1/13 ‘Cottage. Aran Is/ Fish drying on roof/ September 1935’.
[Location on Inis Mór, Oileáin Árann]. Surplus fish were cleaned in fresh water, salted and then left on walls or thatched roofs to dry. The fish had to be retrieved every night, and also if there was a shower of rain, in order to dry them properly for storing.
When Synge first visited the Aran Islands in 1898 he acquired a camera to document his experience. The plates from this first visit were developed by his nephew in Castle Kevin, Co Wicklow, which marks Frank, aged 13, as a proficient in the chemistry of photography. Frank, in turn, paid homage to the islands in the 1920s and 1930s in his own series of beautifully realised images.
Frank graduated as a B.A. from TCD in 1908 and qualified as a solicitor, but he soon relinguished his practice. He trained as a teacher and worked in education for the rest of his career. He was a lecturer in Irish and history in the Church of Ireland Training College, Kildare St, Dublin from 1930 until his death, aged 63, in 1948.
Frank Stephens cast a non-partisan eye on life in Ireland at a time of seismic political and cultural change. His images capture traditional aspects of life and landscape in Ireland that were rapidly disappearing. But it is not a purely sentimental or nostalgic view. Frank deployed his hand-held box camera to record antiquities, architecture and street scenes and, perhaps most effectively, the often strenuous reality of life on the Aran Islands and the west of Ireland.

TCD MS 10842/1/5 ‘Inismaan girls bring up turf/1936’. Turf collection on Inis Meáin, Oileáin Árann.
TCD MS 10842/1/5 ‘Inismaan girls bring up turf/1936’.
Turf collection on Inis Meáin, Oileáin Árann.

The impact of colour is of course absent in these Aran lantern slides. J M Synge describes the islanders’ clothes in his book The Aran Islands (1907):’The women wear red petticoats and jackets of the island wool stained with madder, to which they usually add a plaid shawl twisted round their chests and tied at their back. When it rains they throw another petticoat over their heads with the waistband round their faces, or, if they are young, they use a heavy shawl like those worn in Galway. Occasionally other wraps are worn, and during the thunderstorm I arrived in I saw several girls with men’s waistcoats buttoned round their bodies. Their skirts do not come much below the knee, and show their powerful legs in the heavy indigo stockings with which they are all provided. The men wear three colours: the natural wool, indigo, and a grey flannel that is woven of alternate threads of indigo and the natural wool.’

TCD MS 10842/1/78 ‘Thrashing’. Threshing corn on rocks on [Aran Islands/ Oileáin Árainn, c. 1920-1935].
TCD MS 10842/1/78 ‘Thrashing’.
Threshing corn on rocks on [Aran Islands/ Oileáin Árainn, c. 1920-1935].
Frank used his collection of over 2000 lantern slides as a source for entertainment and education, illustrating his frequent public lectures on local history, Celtic art and Irish antiquities. This collection – now TCD MS 10842 – was generously presented by Margaret and Lanto Synge. We are also grateful to Anne Louise Moore and Gerry Cantan, Frank Stephens’s grandchildren, for copyright permission to reproduce these images.

Felicity O’ Mahony