J. M. Synge Lecture: Prof. Paige Reynolds (College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, USA), "'Moving through the Scene Openly and Invisibly': The Photographs of J. M. Synge, Eudora Welty, and Luis Alberto Rodriguez"

In 1898, J. M. Synge purchased a camera from a fellow tourist on the Aran Islands and inaugurated a practice of photographing scenes of Irish life.  His photographs often focused on the quotidian in rural Ireland, capturing the textures of daily life and labor in the early twentieth-century. In 1971, Lilo Stephens published these photographs in the collection My Wallet of Photographs: The Collected Photographs of J. M. Synge. That same year, Eudora Welty would publish a collection entitled One Time, One Place (1971).  This book reproduced photographs of daily life across Mississippi, which Welty had taken when she worked as a publicity agent for the Work Progress Administration during the Depression.  Like those of Synge, her photographs attend closely to the subjects she explored in her writing – labor and commerce in small towns, the textures of rural poverty, experiences among marginalized communities, practices of faith. 

This lecture, whose title derives from Welty’s description of her task as a photographer, will explore what we learn by juxtaposing the work of these two writers, these two photographers. And it will close by considering the traction of their interests and aesthetics through the photographs of Luis Alberto Rodriguez, whose People of the Mud (2020) depicts the intimacies of dance and sport in contemporary rural Wexford.

Paige Reynolds, Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, publishes on the subjects of modernism, drama and performance, and modern and contemporary Irish literature. She is author of Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford UP, 2024) and Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge UP, 2007). She also is editor of Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (Anthem Press, 2016), The New Irish Studies (Cambridge UP, 2020), and (with Eric Falci) Irish Literature in Transition, Volume 6, 1980-2020 (Cambridge UP, 2020).

Registration 

If you are interested in participating in this online event, please sign up by submitting this registration form or by sending an email with the subject line “SYNGE” to irishstudies@uni-wuerzburg.de by April 25, 2025. Please include your full name and affiliation. Online participants will receive a zoom link to the event in due time. Please note that the above given email address is used solely for registration purposes. If you want to contact ISWÜ, please use the contact information given below.

Contact
Irish Studies Würzburg (ISWÜ)
Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann & Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann
ina.bergmann@uni-wuerzburg.de,  maria.eisenmann@uni-wuerzburg.de