uir.ulster.ac.ukuir.ulster.ac.uk/36832/1/baylis_final.docx · web viewthe history of photography...

Con Colbert’s Portrait: The Lives of a Photograph

Gail Baylis

The history of photography has generally been conceived of in terms of technical

advances, aesthetics, genre or oeuvre. This article proposes that other histories become

apparent when materiality is foregrounded. To support this proposition this study

focuses primarily on one portrait photograph and its embedded history, which is evident

in its shifts in material form. The photograph under consideration is of Cornelius, more

familiarly known as Con Colbert, a minor figure in the Irish Rising of 1916. His

memory came to exceed the life of a man and to understand why this was the case it is

necessary to focus on the mediated presence of his portrait image in a culture of

remembrance. What Colbert’s portrait makes evident is that a photograph is a material

object that carries a history in its transferences, display formats, and layered meanings.

Photographs do things, they have agency, are affective and in turn are effected by

cultural needs and interpretation. In other words, it is proposed that a history of the

photograph is embedded in the exchanges and uses to which it is put which cannot be

separated out from choices of material form.

Keywords: materiality, reproduction, Con Colbert (1888–1916), Easter Rising 1916,

Ireland, commemoration, memory, visual culture, object-hood

A young man stares intently and directly from the picture frame. His mouth is set in a

purposeful way. He has dark, short, side-parted hair and his ears protrude from his hairline.

He is dressed in a hand-knitted jumper with lighter collar and a dark jacket. In the history of

History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016

photographic portraiture such a close up head-and-shoulders shot, as I describe, suggests a

studio portrait. The photograph I gaze on is a portrait of Cornelius, more commonly known as

Con Colbert. My description indicates the impurity of looking because on a literal level, as I

will go on to explain, what I am seeing is an image created from another photograph, and on

a perceptual level because my ‘looking is inherently framed, framing, interpreting, affect-

laden, cognitive and intellectual’,1 and influenced by knowledge that I bring to bear on the

image from outside the picture frame.

In what has become a foundational essay for material culture studies, Arjun Appadurai

observed that ‘commodities, like persons, have social lives’ and as such offer ‘“life

histories”’; to study these requires recognising that ‘it is the things-in-motion that illuminate

their human and social context.’2 An ‘eventful biography’ derives from ‘the various

singularitizations of it, of classifications and reclassifications in an uncertain world of

categories whose importance shifts’.3 Such arguments have had an important influence on

the material-turn in photographic theory, articulated most clearly in Photographs Objects

Histories, a collection of essays edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart. All the essays

in this volume emphasise the object-ness of photographs, their layered-ness and the traces

that they carry of their histories on them, and in this respect move the study of photography

away from an ideological reading to a material one. Photographs as material forms ‘exist in

dialogue with the image itself to create the associative values placed on them’.4 This study

focuses on the social-ness of one photograph to argue that altering the historical approach

from the purely visual toward the material enables a broader analysis of the type of shifting

material forms that are required in the production of memory and memorialisation through

the use of the photographic image.

The photograph I will analyse initially operated in a specific context – namely the

Easter Rising in Ireland of 1916. It has been claimed that the photographs of ‘the


smouldering ruins, left in the wake of the battles between the “insurgents” and the British

forces’ are the ones that ‘became a signifier for the memory of Easter Week’.5 I foreground,

in contrast, the portrait photograph, which while carrying a different register, was equally

significant, if not more so, for how the Rising was made sense of and identified with as

memory. It was the executions more so than the destruction wrought on Dublin that affected

collective memory: their effect, in words widely credited to James Stephens, ‘was like

watching blood oozing from under a door’.6 Arguably, a number of portraits of other

executed leaders could have been chosen for the purpose of this study: Colbert, as will be

further outlined, was singled out for his youthful appearance, gaze at the camera and

photogenic qualities; all factors that influenced how his image would be understood and used.

The Colbert I describe in the photograph was produced as a memory text and it

evidences how the image-object is a site where ‘discursive formation intersects with material

properties’.7 The photograph’s existence, therefore, points to a cultural need and in this

context ‘[t]o understand what we have made, we have to be able to remember it’; this is a

process that involves memory, which ‘cannot distinguish between the registers of facts and

that of interpretation’.8 The keeping, storing, and display of the photograph, ‘like other

souvenirs’, is ‘an act of faith in the future’.9 The photograph as memory text therefore pulls in

two directions – to remembrance and interpretation and to expectation and the future.

Through its varied material forms the lives of one photograph will be explored in order to

assess how and why Colbert’s image became embedded in the history of the Irish Rising and

what this can tell us about the relationship between photography and memory.

Colbert the Photograph

Colbert was neither a leading figure in the planning of or the execution of the Rising. His

significance emerges after the events and then, I would argue, only as a mediated memory.


Luke, 06/01/17,

‘like watching blood oozing from under a door’. James Stephens, Insurrection in Dublin (1916)

Factual information on Colbert is scant: his most recent biographer notes this difficulty,

pointing to the inadequacy of previous accounts that ‘exemplified the hagiographic approach

to the rebels which came into vogue soon after the Rising and held sway in some quarters for

several decades’.10 Such highly idealised accounts cemented the central myth of the

foundation of the Irish State – namely the martyr status of the rebels. What marked the

Rising as a memory was the speed with which it was commodified: the production of a

‘patriotic cult’ depended in large measure on the ‘flood of rebel memorabilia’ produced in its

immediate wake; this ‘new iconography [images, mementos and pictorial souvenirs] was

probably more influential than revolutionary ideas or texts’. 11 This context, I suggest, is

significant for how and why Colbert’s portrait gains popular currency because ‘in the

immediate aftermath of the Rising it was photography that was first mobilised in the

processes of commemoration’.12

A native of County Limerick, Colbert moved to Dublin in 1904 where he continued

his education at a Christian Brothers school and thereafter worked as a junior clerk in

Kennedy’s Bakery, Dublin, until his death. In this respect Colbert represents a new breed of

Irish youth who had benefitted from the expansion of literacy, greater leisure, and the new

‘modality of political communication’13 that focused on media coverage and engendered, by

the beginning of the twentieth century, a new youth-led radicalism in Irish separatist

nationalism. Few extant photographs of Colbert exist: what have survived are a studio portrait

of him in formal attire; a publicity photograph of him drilling the boys at Patrick Pearse’s St

Enda school; a group photograph of the Limerick IRB (1913); a seated studio portrait; a

group portrait of the Fianna Council (1915); two photo-mechanical prints of him in Irish

Volunteer uniform (1916) and a number of large group photographs of the Fianna taken at

their Ardfeis (annual convention) in which he appears (ca. 1910–13).


He was a founder member of Na Fianna Eireann – the Irish nationalist boy scouts

established in 1909 with an avowedly military ethos. He was also a member of the Irish

Republican Brotherhood (IRB) (the exact date he was sworn in is unknown but it is likely to

have been prior to him joining the Fianna14), and head of a Fianna Circle in that organisation

from 1912. These connections explain some of the photographs of him, such as those of the

Ardfeis, the Fianna Council portrait of 1915, his presence in the group photograph of the

Limerick IRB, and his involvement at St Edna’s where he acted as a drilling instructor and

was involved in the covert activity of recruiting the elder boys into the IRB.

The Ardfeis group portraits were taken by the commercial firm of Keogh Brothers of

Dublin, established in the same year as the Fianna. A careful study of these commemorative

portraits reveals the source for the image of Colbert (as I have described it) that would

become a mnemonic signifier. It is a large-group portrait in which he appears seated in the

second row. Other prominent Fianna members include Countess Markievicz and Bulmer

Hobson (the organisation’s founders), Eamon Martin, Liam Mellows, Padraig O’Riain, Garry

and Patrick Holohan, all of whom, with the exception of Hobson, would go on to be active

participants in the Rising. This photograph was reproduced on the cover of the August edition

of the radical newspaper Irish Freedom, which was edited by Hobson. It is credited to the

Keogh Bros. and captioned ‘Fourth Annual Ard-Fheis held in the Mansion House, Dublin,

July 13, 1913’. Chosen from a number of possible Ardfeis portraits, it significantly shows a

notably youthful-looking Colbert who stares earnestly and directly to camera.

Within the Keogh archive is evidence of how the cropped single portrait came into

being. The source photograph makes plain that Colbert wears Fianna uniform in what

became a single head and shoulder close up portrait. A glass plate reveals that his image has

been enlarged from the original and then it has been worked on through dodging and over-

drawing. Still visible are the outlines of other bodies, thus indicating the source to be the


larger group portrait and that this plate is a work for printing (figure 1). Such procedures

indicate the degree of manual manipulation of photographs in print that occurred by the early

twentieth century.15 From this glass plate the Keogh Brothers produced a direct photographic

portrait print of Colbert and a card-backed mounted halftone version (figure 2). The effect of

prioritising the portrait view is to erase the environment evident in the full-frame original,

which gave the photograph a specific context. This is replaced by an emphasis on the face

and a timeless context.

When the worked-on glass plate was created remains unclear; however, similar

manipulation of Keogh group portraits was undertaken to produce single portraits of a

number of other figures who would come to be associated with the Rising.16 This suggests a

likely connection. The Rising took both the authorities and public by surprise. James

Stephens, present in Dublin at the time, recalled how the perpetrators were unknown and in

circumstances where there was an absence of printed news rumour and misinformation

abounded.17 These conditions suggest that the portrait of Colbert and those of other IRB

participants may have been produced as exchange tokens of friendship and affiliation in the

run up to the Rising (ca. 1915–16) or as commemorative souvenirs in its immediate wake.

What this indicates is that the photograph is always made for a purpose; it is kept, stored and

displayed for other reasons that may or may not accord with the intentions of the producer.

The IRB was a secret oath-bearing separatist nationalist movement. Its Military

Council planned and implemented the Rising without the knowledge of the membership.

Colbert appears not to have been privy to these plans for an insurrection until its final stages.

Regardless, he was single-minded in his adherence to the Irish Cause which he conjoined to

fervent Catholicism and abstinence: his politics were conservative, stressing national self-

determinacy above class and gender struggles. He became a founder member of the Irish

Volunteers at its inception (1913), serving both as a Captain of the Fourth Battalion, Dublin


and also on that body’s Provincial Council. He had studio portraits taken of himself in

Volunteer uniform in the weeks leading up to the Rising.18 These were produced by the

Dublin firm of O’Loughlin, Murphy, and Boland and show an older-looking Colbert with

slicked back hair wearing full Volunteer uniform with gun in holster and holding a rolled up

paper. In one photograph he leans upon a simple wooden chair, in another he is seated on it.

Composition, costume, and props (gun, a fetish of the rebels, and rolled up paper which

stands for an important document) evidence how Colbert wished to present himself as a

military figure.

During the Rising in Dublin (24–29 April 1916), he served at the South Dublin Union

where he saw little action beyond the hectoring of an angry group of women protesting at the

rebels’ actions.19 Nonetheless, on Sunday April 30, on hearing the command for

unconditional surrender, he ‘was completely stunned. The tears rolled down his cheeks’.20

Thereafter he was executed in Kilmainham gaol, Dublin on 8 May 1916. He was twenty-

three years old at the time of his death. In response to his execution O’Loughlin, Murphy, and

Boland printed the portrait in a number of formats: as mounted photograph with caption

‘Captain Con Colbert / Executed. May 8, 1916’ (figure 3); as print illustration; and as one of

a series of fifteen portraits of the leading figures. The relatively lightweight paper together

with the coating and size (each portrait measured 15 x 22 inches) suggest that this series was

produced for fly posting. In a few instances this portrait appears on composite

commemorative posters but overwhelmingly it is the Keogh portrait and the Powell Press

postcard (to which I turn now) that are used to cement a memory of Colbert in popular

consciousness. Posthumous intentionality, as will be made clear, does not guarantee how

photographs operate in remembrance contexts.

Colbert the Image


Postcards, in particular, provided an accessible and affordable means to keep up to date with

topical events and to circulate news. The Powell Press of 22 Parliament Street, Dublin,

alongside other photographic firms, produced a series of photographs commemorating the

Rising. These postcards served to fill a void in light of the absence of reportage while the

insurrection was taking place. What differentiated the Powell series was that it was

comprised solely of portraits – those of the executed leaders or persons who took a significant

role in the insurrection. The majority of the source images for the postcards were acquired

from Keogh stock. This is acknowledged on the verso, which is divided for address and

correspondence, a format that became standard after 1907. The dating of the series to May

rather than April, when the rebellion took place, evidences that the initial printing by the

Powell Press occurred to exploit the shift in the public mood from hostility to sympathy,

engendered by the execution of the leaders. The executions in Dublin occurred between May

3 and May 12, and the ‘way in which they were spaced out compounded the [sense of]

barbarity’.21 Official correspondence on the suppression of seditious materials corroborates

this dating and it indicates that the Powell postcards must have been in circulation at least by

the end of May, if not earlier.22

The Powell Press adopted the halftone process to produce the series and the mode of

reproduction is significant. The halftone is ‘essentially public, ephemeral, and part of the

everyday’ which when adopted to print a portrait adds support to a reading of subjectivity;

the apparent neutrality of the process is reinforced by the ostensible objectivity of

photography.23 Such objectivity was, as has been indicated by the process of producing the

single portrait, highly mediated, but it was effective because those signs could be rendered

invisible. This translation also indicates how a photograph is a social object that ‘cannot be

fully understood at a single point in its existence but should be understood as belonging in a

continuing process of production, exchange, usage and meaning’.24


In postcard form the addition of a mount, title, and legend direct the viewer’s

interpretation. Titled the ‘Irish Rebellion, May 1916’, the subject is named and given a

context: in Colbert’s case this reads: ‘CORNELIUS COLBERT/who took a prominent part in

the Rebellion’, followed by the date of his execution (figure 4). Linguistic anchorage

establishes a pre-text for reading the image; this is further extended through pictorial affect:

the close-up isolated figure forms the focus of attention. It is the ‘retrospective knowledge of

the fate of Colbert that imbues the image with the resonance of a memento mori and in turn,

his boyish looks with the status of the sacrifice of youth for the cause of nation’.25

The Powell postcards, displayed in Dublin shop windows, were readily available for

purchase and their popularity was evidenced by their further display ‘in houses all over

Ireland’.26 Thus the likenesses of those involved in the Rising became visible in the very

cityscape where the events had occurred, while as memento displayed in the home served a

privatised, solemnising function. A photograph can only say ‘for certain what has been’.27

This makes all photographs, in one sense, containers of the past and the effect is that the

portrait photograph creates a modulation between presence (the visual likeness of the subject

as in life) and absence (the knowledge that the person viewed is literally no longer there).

For contemporaneous patriotic culture these relations affectively made the cause for which

the rebels had died a visual interpolation while at the same time making the image a vehicle

for one to one identification and mourning. Interestingly, given the format, there is little

evidence for the postcards being sent; rather they appear to have been collected as

commemorative souvenirs.28 This offers a significant instance of where the moment of

inscription is overwritten by the history of use.

The execution of the leaders came to serve as ‘another episode in Ireland’s potent

martyrology’.29 The Catholic Church was quick to respond and ‘in effect co-opted the rebels’

secular martyrdom for itself’.30 Purchasing postcard portraits of the dead leaders became an


act akin to religious devotion. As one contemporary recalled: ‘[I]n the early mornings Mother

and I went into town to the Franciscan or Augustinian church where Mass was said for the

dead rebels, and on the way back we bought picture postcards of them’.31 Indeed, as Peter

Hart highlights, ‘Irish nationalism was as much consumed as practised’.32

This holds significance for the use of the photographic portrait on memorial cards. The

1915 group portrait of the Fianna Council (figure 5) is the source for the portrait that appears

on Colbert’s memorial card. While this is a different source image to the Powell postcard,

both images share commonalities in being created single portraits obtained from an earlier

Keogh group photograph; the effect is to prioritise physiognomy and the direct gaze at the

camera. Study of the memorial card reveals how a connection is also visually created

between photograph and text style, most notably in the deployment of old Irish script (figure

6). Font choice conjoins the linguistic imperative to pray for the soul of Colbert with calling

into play popular Irish nationalist historiography (a lineage of noble but doomed heroes) and

the idea of an unbroken Gaelic tradition rendered through calligraphy style.

As a material object the Memorial card holds a specific function: it forms part of a

liturgical ritual performance. The experience produced was haptic and visceral and this

extends the meaning of the portrait beyond what it literally shows. A Memorial card is of a

size that fits easily in the hand; it can be stored in a pocket thus producing a close physical

presence or within a prayer book where it acts as a reminder to say a prayer for the departed.

Such cards took on a heighted resonance at the Month’s Mind Masses,33 which allowed the

‘first open manifestation of the deep public feeling aroused by the executions’ and the ‘first

opportunity that sympathisers of the rebels had to come out in the open’.34 These Masses

became ‘occasions for quite spontaneous demonstrations’; the wearing of badges bearing the

colours green, white, and orange (the colours of the rebels’ flag) allowed ‘mutual recognition

and sympathy among a large section of the people’.35


It needs to be recognised, however, that not only did the Irish Catholic Church co-opt

the Rising to its own ends but also that the choreography of the Rising was intended to chime

with Catholic ritualism. Initially the insurrection had been planned for Easter Sunday, the

most important day in the Catholic calendar. Pearse’s poems and speeches were replete with

references to blood sacrifice, redemption through suffering and the value of martyrdom; last

speeches and letters by the rebels were consciously phrased in terms of religious analogies.

Given the clandestine nature with which the Rising was planned along with the confusion

caused by order and counter-order at its beginning which resulted in a shortfall in

mobilisation, it would have been impossible to predict who would become recognised as the

leaders. These circumstances go some way to explaining why no group portrait was made.

And, supposing, a photograph had been taken, given that Colbert was not one of the

organisers, it is unlikely that he would have appeared in it.

But more significant, with regard to the effect of the singular portrait photograph, is the

fact that political iconography, as Sean Farrell Moran has outlined, can only take hold if it

ties in with symbols of the past,36 and in the aftermath of 1916 that symbolism was primarily

Catholic. The iconology of Catholic saints tends to be singular, often with particular saints or

martyrs having an association with a region. The image of a saint (picture or statue) is prayed

to for intervention, with some saints being linked to special causes or professions. Irish

nationalism’s pantheon of dead leaders foregrounded the individual hero, whose image

served as an inducement for renewed struggle. The interpretation of Colbert’s image in

nationalist-religious terms (as with the other executed) can be seen as an instance of this

relational field. In this context it is worth drawing attention to variant Memorial cards that

were produced for the rebels with an image of the Virgin Mary in the attitude of a pieta.37

Such imagery further emphasised that those who had been executed were martyrs of the

Church. The prayer on the verso of Colbert’s Memorial card explains that ‘A Plenary


Indulgence may be gained on the usual conditions by reciting this prayer before an image or

picture of our Crucified Redeemer […]’ (figure 7). The tradition of Catholic iconic imagery

intersected with Colbert’s photographic image to provide popular nationalism with a site for

incorporation, one that was further supported by the accounts of his devoutness. That the

portrait photograph could shift and become associated with religious symbolism is an

indication of how ‘the treatment of photographs is in many ways analogous to that of relics

[…]. Like relics, photographs are validated through their social biography’.38

And such expressions were not Ireland-only bound; as early as mid-May 1916, a

Memorial Mass was held in San Francisco where the executed were referred to as ‘“saints

and martyrs” of the Catholic Church’, who had redeemed Ireland through their ‘“brilliant

triumph”’.39 The spacing out of the executions meant that these Masses took place

consecutively, the effect being both an individualising (a separate Mass and Memorial card

for each of the leaders) and also a collectivising of the meaning of their actions (the repetition

of the same service and emphasis on sacrifice in religious terminology). Here an

understanding of photographs as material objects allows them to ‘be seen as social actors’

whose agency stems from their existence ‘in this or that specific format’.40 The Memorial

card and postcard of Colbert shared commonalities in portrait presentation and a linking in

how each came to be used. What marked out the Powell postcard from other souvenirs of

Colbert was its linguistic anchorage and the emphasis on the close up that brought to bear on

the viewer the significance of the face and costume (Fianna uniform) to indicate youth,

militarism, and martyrdom. That Colbert came to be popularly remembered as ‘a soldier and

a saint’ references how a sense of a collective past ‘is not only sustained by the world of

objects and artefacts, but is, in part, shaped through the ways in which the world of things is

ordered’. 41


Sequencing

By the turn of the century ‘the convergence of photography within the new communication

networks’ enabled it to become the dominant technology of modernity and memory.42 It is not

until the beginning of the twentieth century that the capacity to print photographs directly

with text came to be widely employed in popular daily newspapers. The modernity of the

moment of the Rising is indicated by how ‘word and image could work so powerfully

together to shape the image of 1916 as a mass-mediated event’.43 The Irish Times’s first full

publication after the Rising was an edition covering April 29, May 6, and May 13. Its front

page provided a mosaic of head and shoulder portraits of the insurgents under the headline,

‘Sinn Fein Rebellion in Ireland’. Not all of the executed participants’ portraits appear,

suggesting some confusion about the facts at this point, but significantly Colbert’s Keogh

portrait is present, appearing in the second row below those of Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh,

Tom Clarke and John McBride, all leading IRB men actively involved in the rebellion. By

reproducing portraits of the executed and imprisoned rebels, the Irish Times not only testified

to the importance that photography had acquired in news reportage but also provided a means

for an eager public starved of news to put a face to a name and thereby begin to piece

together the foregoing events through identification with the photographic likeness.

Photographs are slippery artefacts – a quality appreciated by the Head of Dublin

Metropolitan Police in relation to censorship after the Rising. He explained that the

prohibition of leaflets and pamphlets was containable but photographs proved more difficult

because many photographs ‘have already been published in newspapers whose loyalty cannot

be questioned and are being sold by traders of the utmost respectability’.44 The Irish Times

was a case in point; it was by no means an advocate of the nationalist cause but the paper’s

reproduction of photographs of the rebels gave to them a currency. Likewise, in response to

the change in mood the newspaper produced its own commemorative souvenir edition of the


events of 1916, which by its 1917 issue comprised over two hundred and fifty pages. This, as

with the other souvenir editions, was reliant on photographic illustrations.

The Irish Times advertised its The Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook, Easter 1916 as

offering a ‘Connected Narrative of the Rising’ with ‘Photographs’. Portrait photographs are

used in this publication to tell the narrative of the Rising in a broadly chronological order of

trial and sentence. The Keogh single portrait of Colbert appears in a four-image-page spread

where he appears top left with a portrait of Sean Heuston to his right. This coupling became

standard to emphasise both the Fianna connection they shared and their youth: Heuston was

the youngest rebel to be executed, Colbert the third youngest. Below the pair are portraits of

Markievicz and Henry O’Hanrahan (page sixty-five). Markievicz and O’Hanrahan were

sentenced to death commuted to penal servitude on May 6; Colbert and Heuston were

executed two days later. Preceding this page is another four-image spread of portraits of

William Pearse, Michael O’Hanrahan, Edward Daly (all executed on May 4) and John

McBride who received the same fate on May 5 (page sixty-three). Following on from it are

portraits of key combative rebels (The O’Rahilly and Thomas Ashe) and figures such as

Eamon De Valera who would go on to become the president of the Irish Free State.45

Ordering here, and other examples can be found in the illustrated souvenir editions, evidence

how ‘the halftone is essentially multiple, meant to be seen in relation to other images’.46 The

memory of Colbert gains status due to how his portrait is sequenced in a multiple framework.

This is augmented with linguistic anchorage. By the 1917 issue, Colbert and the other three

executed on May 8 had become men who ‘took a very prominent part in the rebellion’.47 This

is an assertion that had the effect of transforming Colbert’s actual limited combative role into

one of significance in memory.

Pre-eminent among mass-produced souvenirs were the Powell postcards, which were

incorporated within a range of productions. The currency of photographs extended the


immediate news coverage of the Rising and thereby they were effectively embedded within

popular memory in both Ireland and for diasporic audiences. A whole raft of broadside

posters, emphasising different aspects of the Rising and appealing to differing levels of

patriotism from the popular to the confirmedly nationalist, appeared as pictorial souvenirs. In

most instances these posters utilised the Powell postcards for illustrative purposes. In this

format text, decoration, and sequencing organise meaning and visual recall. Titles included

generic phrasing such as ‘Leaders of the Irish Rising’, ‘Significant Personages who took Part

in the Rising’ to the more intended memorising of organisations such as the Irish Volunteers

or the IRB. Regardless of title, visual arrangement is significant for how Colbert moves from

periphery to centre stage in the memory of the Rising.

One poster produced about 1917 positions Colbert in the top row of a mosaic

arrangement of sixteen portraits. He again appears next to Heuston; the pair is flanked by

Thomas MacDonagh and Sean MacDiarmade (both IRB men and signatories). As with other

commemorative posters, with the exception of Pearse’s, Connolly’s, and Markevicz’s images,

which are Lafayette portraits, all are Powell postcards produced from Keogh photographs.

Titled ‘Irish Republican Army: Leaders in the Insurrection May, 1916’, this poster positions

Colbert in a role he did not attain in life but through pictorial arrangement and linguistic

address, as with the Irish Times commemorative 1917 issue, he comes to hold in death.

Modifications in the ordering and arrangement occur in other posters but what is significant is

that Colbert now regularly appears alongside portraits of the signatories of the Proclamation

and figures who gained credence in post-Rising politics such as Eamon De Valera and

Countess Markievicz. The same Keogh photographic source appears in yet another

modification; this time his image is tightly cropped and set in a central frame as an insert in a

stamp to mark the Rising. In stamp form he appears alongside Pearse, James Connolly, The

O’Rahilly, Edward Daley, and Eamonn Ceannt. With the exception of O’Rahilly, who was


prominent in the Irish Volunteers and was shot ‘in action’, all were the executed of 1916.

This series titled ‘Erie Puist’, with the typographical error of spelling Erin as ‘Erie’, has been

attributed with being produced in North America and serving that market.48 Through

repetition and visual association Colbert entered the pantheon of nationalist iconography.

Commemorative Postcard Collecting

The Rising occurred at a point when the craze for postcard collecting and the vogue for

displaying postcards in albums still held sway.49 Such a display format modulates

interpretative repertoires through modes of sequencing, the insertion of hand-written

commentary, and the inclusion of additional materials. These elements of collecting and

ordering materials provided scope for both the expression of public endorsement and personal

memorising. Albums offer ‘their owners the chance to determine and design how the

photographs will be displayed and seen’.50 An Irish postcard album that documents the Rising

was produced by Art O’Murnaghan. The front page bears the title ‘Postcards Illustrating Irish

Rising, 1916. The Gift of Art O’Murnaghan (1927)’.51 Measuring 22 by 29 cm, it holds

eighty-seven postcards beginning with portraits from the ‘Irish Rebellion’ series, followed by

topographical ‘before and after’ shots of the Dublin cityscape, a series of postcards of the

roundup of suspects, the wounded, and visitors to prisoners being searched by the military

authorities (Daily Sketch and Valentine postcards).

Significantly, some of the Powell postcards have been modified by hand-written

annotation: the word ‘rebellion’ in the postcard title has been scored through and above it has

been hand-written in capitals ‘RISING’. This replacement indicates the insertion of linguistic

controlling of memory and suggests a political sympathy – semantically the word rebellion

carries overtones of lack of legitimacy whereas rising inserts an emphasis on a conscious act

and political causality. This procedure ceases after page five, suggesting, possibly, that an


intended narrativisation had been imparted leaving it unnecessary to continue or that the

compiler lost interest in doing so. Colbert’s portrait appears on page seven and ordering and

display choices are evident. It appears on a separate page after the portraits of the Military

Council and alongside the portrait of Heuston (both Powell postcards). Significant here is

another instance of the coupling of two of the youngest executed insurgents who had close

associations with the Fianna.

Another album compiled by Diarmuid McManus evidences differing collecting,

ordering and display choices. This is a more chronologically detailed album covering the

period from 1914 to 1916 and its focus is more consciously on the Irish Volunteers. The

timeframe covers not only the Rising but also the events leading up to and after it. While this

album contains fewer postcards than O’Murnaghan’s (twenty-five in total) it augments these

creatively with press cuttings, pamphlets and letters. For example, an account of the Howth

Gun Running (1914), in which Fianna youths played a significant role in transporting guns

smuggled into Ireland from Germany, is included alongside a newspaper clipping bearing a

photograph captioned ‘The National Boy Scouts, who played a brave and prominent part in

connection with the gun-running coup on Sunday’. Another undated newspaper photograph

shows a young boy posing with a rifle. A copy of The O’Rahilly’s Secret History of the

Volunteers further contextualises the development of militarism in Irish nationalist politics.

Also included is a letter from I. Corcoran, dated 17 July 1916, from Frongoch, an internment

camp in Wales where many participants and suspected sympathisers with the insurrection

were sent in its wake and which acted as a university for nationalism spawning many future

radicalised rebels. A letter written by Mrs A. MacNeill concerning her husband’s conviction

(1916) is also included. These written texts – accounts of the growth of nationalist militarism

leading up to the Rising and epistolary accounts of the consequences of its failure from a

personal point of view – augment how the postcards will be read.


The postcards included in this album are drawn from the same sources as those in the

O’Murnaghan album, though the display format is more anchored to contemporaneous

textual accounts and press coverage of events. McManus demarcates the section given over

to the Rising by a section break and title page that reads ‘The Tragedy 1916’.52 A leaf of the

album is dedicated to Colbert; accompanying the Powell postcard of him are press cuttings

relating to his death, as well as two short obituaries for young Irish Volunteers who were

killed during the Rising. Two newsprint reproductions of the same head and shoulders

photograph of him that appeared in the press for his obituary have been pasted onto the page.

The caption accompanying the photograph opens with the statement ‘shot following sentence

of court martial’, followed by a standard obituary account of his place of origin and family

lineage. The defacement of one of these portraits suggests a form of excess and the need to

control materials, but if the intention had been to remove this image it was clearly not carried

out. Its appearance suggests a reticence to impose a metaphoric wounding of both image and

page, which would have resulted by removal.

Another obituary taken from the press reproduces the Keogh photograph. The Powell

Press postcard portrait is placed next to a press account of the ‘Last Moments of Mr C.

Colbert’ (figure 8). Two additional obituaries without photographs are also arranged on the

page. What differentiates them is inference; the more overtly nationalist one refers to him as

‘Captain Irish Republican Army’ and as having given ‘his life for Ireland’. This cutting is

placed beneath the account of Colbert’s last moments. Significant here, in terms of the

Colbert postcard is how ‘in an album a portrait is no longer a singular image, but becomes

fundamentally tied to the images that come before and after […] The making of meaning is

thus not just in the image, but also in how it is displayed’.53 In terms of differing material

forms of display, such as commemorative souvenir edition, poster and album, sequencing

produces a multiple as well as singular relation to the portrait.


The author of the ‘Last Moments of Mr C. Colbert’ is Father Augustine, a Capuchin

Friar, who accompanied Colbert to his execution. He is at pains to refute the claim made in

the Irish Independent that Colbert had been joking prior to the execution. His account

stresses the piety and courage that Colbert exhibited at the execution scene: ‘There was no

joking, nor even the semblance of it. Poor Colbert was far too beautiful and reverent a

character to joke with anyone at a solemn hour. I know well where his heart was then. He

was very near to God, and the friends he loved’. Father Augustine goes on to describe how

Colbert went to his execution with ‘lips moving in prayer, the brave lad went forth to die’.54

This version of events would go on to gain hagiographic status for how Colbert’s memory

and his postcard image would be understood. Such testimony from the Capuchin Friars, who

ministered to the condemned rebels in their final days, of their piety and suffering ‘helped to

shape the nationalist perception of the executions as a latter-day Passion’.55 The symbolism of

the Rising occurring in Easter Week was also not missed. In Colbert’s case, his strong

religious adherence and reputation as a drilling instructor came to be equated with faith and

fatherland. This association called into play his early role in the Fianna, which was credited

with keeping the military spirit alive in Ireland as well as producing youths willing to

sacrifice their lives in the name of Ireland.

Albums facilitate a display format that allows the producer to insert herself or

himself within visuality by constructing the terms on which memory will be inscribed.

McManus’s arrangement of items on the page is far from arbitrary; it indicates a desire to

create and control meaning. The adjacent placement of the postcard and Father Augustine’s

account, together with an obituary that emphasises that Colbert ‘died for Ireland’ gives a

meaning to the portrait and in turn this refracts back on to how his image will be read. Loose

collections of the Powell postcards, of course, hold different relations, most notably in that

the verso provides a surface for inserting meaning. A collection of the Powell postcards


collected by Kathleen Hassett includes the Colbert postcard; she has written on its verso ‘Co.

Limerick, met at ceilide […] 18th March, R.I.P.’56 Such notation inflect a referent for how

Colbert’s image communicated as a personalised address to the object of mourning. In a

similar fashion a studio portrait of him holds a personalised notation on the verso: ‘Property

of Mrs L. Colbert’. This was Colbert’s sister, Lila Colbert (figure 9). As with his Memorial

card, this portrait was produced from the group portrait of the Fianna Council. A postcard

version of it was also produced.

What these examples confirm is that what has been more widely understood as ‘the

act of remembering someone is surely also about the positioning of oneself, about the

affirmation of one’s own place in time and space, about establishing oneself within a social

and historical network of relationships’.57 Image meaning is therefore dialogic. As Bal argues,

‘it comes about through rather than existing prior to interpretation’; this is a relationship

‘between viewer and object as well as between viewers’.58 What this tells us is that the

meaning of visual texts – and in the instance of this study, Colbert’s photographic postcard –

exceed the literal and ideological through material and embodied usage.

Re-Remembering

I have considered various material forms that Colbert’s portrait took alongside the uses to

which it was put. However, ‘the act of rendering memorable does not mean that at any stage

it will be remembered’.59 Indeed, memory is as much about forgetting as it is about

remembering. This was the case with Colbert; the Irish Republican Army effectively took

over the Fianna in 1921 and his association with that movement and physical-force

nationalism acted to move the memory of him to a marginal space. ‘The Troubles’ in

Northern Ireland, which spilled over the border in the late 1960s, further distanced his

memory. His associations with radical nationalism, espousal of violence, single-minded


dedication to training youths to become fighters, and his emulation of the figure of the soldier

sat awkwardly in this different context of violence and terrorism. These factors affected the

currency of his image. Shifts in memorialising have context-driven effects on photographic

meaning. Such influences are evident in TG4, the Irish language television station’s 1916:

Seachtar Dearmadta (1916: Forgotten Seven). Produced by Abu Media, a small, Galway-

based independent media company, the seven episodes profile the seven non-signatories who

were executed as a consequence of the Rising: the episode on Colbert aired on 13 November

2013, and was repeated on 16 November 2013 at prime time. Since then the series has

migrated to UTube where each episode can be watched in full. 60 This platform offers global

access and it indicates the transcultural character of contemporary memory.

Many of the key photographs I have examined are integrated in the episode

dedicated to Colbert. The Powell postcard appears midway (34.12 minutes); it is sequenced

after the images of him drilling the St Enda boys and the group photograph of the Fianna

Council, and is followed by the photograph of him in Volunteer uniform. Placement and

sequencing is significant for the interpretation of these photographs. The boyish looks and the

personal address of the postcard are now referenced in an order of image sequencing that

point to an acceleration of militarism that will lead to the inevitable violence of the Rising.

The Colbert who emerges on film is a zealot and one who could not cope with the realities of

the Ireland of his day. Where the postcard is placed and how it is used as an intertextual

reference indicates a revision of the hagiographic interpretation of his image. The use of

photographs in this docu-drama highlights how as ‘the historical, the photographic image’s

circulation through and across space subjects it to various practices of looking and cultural

use’.61 It also highlights how, far from being immaterial, the digitised historical image carries

traces of its earlier inscriptions, which now are re-negotiated in alternative memory


formulations. To appreciate this significance requires recognising ‘how memories become

inscribed in material forms and how those material forms shape memory’.62

It has been noted that ‘memories do not hold still’ and that ‘media constitutes in

many respects a key dimension of memory’s “travels”’.63 In Ireland modern memory and

modern media emerge at the turn of the twentieth century when key technologies of media

instigate a new sense of immediacy in remembering. These factors made Easter Week

memorable; indeed, as Christopher Morash notes, ‘the Rising was a media event as much as

it was a military operation’.64 Media and memory became intertwined, and it is in this context

that we need to appraise the social biography of Colbert’s postcard image. The transformation

of the ‘biographical object’, in this instance the portrait photograph, ‘shows how the lines

between persons and things blur and shift’.65 This study has aimed to show how the

repositioning of Colbert’s portrait allowed it to be inscribed and re-negotiated to produce

differing versions of the past. The Powell postcard in its various sequencings and uses

became the dominant image of Colbert because, arguably, it contained the required signs of

youth, masculinity, and personal address that were needed at the time. The situatedness of

Colbert’s portrait within histories of the Rising indicate how it became embedded in Irish

cultural history as a visual token for remembering, forgetting, and re-appraisal. In other

words, its photographic meaning is dependent on material use, interpretation, and context. If

‘[e]ven memory has a history’ then so does a photograph when it is inserted in remembrance

culture.66

Illustration Captions

Figure 1. Keogh Brothers, Glass Plate for Con Colbert’s Portrait, glass plate positive produced from

a 1913 group portrait commemorating the Fianna Ardfeis, ca. 1915–16. Courtesy of the National

Library of Ireland, Dublin.


Figure 2. Keogh Brothers, Direct Photographic Print of Con Colbert, ca. 1915–16. Courtesy of the

National Library of Ireland.

Figure 3. O’Loughlin, Murphy, and Boland, Studio Portrait of Con Colbert in Irish Volunteer

Uniform, photographic print, 1916. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Figure 4. Powell Press, Irish Rebellion, May 1916 series: Con Colbert, halftone postcard, 1916.

Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Figure 5. Keogh Brothers, Group Portrait of the Fianna Council, photographic print, 1915. Courtesy

of the National Library of Ireland.

Figure 6. Keogh Brothers original photograph, Memorial Card for Con Colbert, printer unknown,

ca.1916–17. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Figure 7. Keogh Brothers original photograph, Verso of Memorial Card for Con Colbert with

Instructions for Plenary Indulgence, printer unknown, ca.1916–17. Courtesy of the National Library

of Ireland.

Figure 8. Diarmuid McManus, Album page commemorating Con Colbert, mixed media, 1916.

Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Figure 9. Keogh Brothers, Photograph of Con Colbert Produced from the 1915 Fianna Council

Group Portrait, direct photographic print, ca. 1915–16. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.


1The author wishes to thank Bernie Metcalf of the National Library of Ireland’s copy prints service, Keith

Murphy and Nora Thornton from the National Photographic Archive (NLI), and Colm Murphy (University

of Ulster) for taking the time to answer my questions on Irish Catholic iconography. Thanks also go to the

two anonymous readers of History of Photography for their constructive and astute feedback.

Email for correspondence: [email protected]

1 – Mieke Bal, ‘Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, 2:1 (April

2003), 9.

22 – Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things:

Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986,

3–5, 41.

33 – Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of

Things, ed. Appadurai, 90.

44 – Elizabeth Edwards and Janet Hart, ‘Introduction: Photographs as Objects’, in Photographs Objects

Histories, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, London: Routledge 2004, 2.

55 – Justin Carville, ‘Visualizing the Rising: Photography, Memory, and the Visual Economy of the 1916

Easter Week’, in Photographs, Histories, and Meanings, ed. Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda

Warley, New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2009, 100.

66 – Quoted in Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien, Grafton: Dublin

1989, 11. Although Cronin does not provide a source, James Stephens has been widely credited with this

quote. I have been unable, however, to confirm the original source.

77 – Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century,

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1990, 31.

88 – Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press 1993, 13.

99 – Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’, in Material Memories: Design and Evocation,

ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley, Oxford: Berg 1999, 226.

mailto:[email protected]

1010 – John O’Callaghan, 16 Lives: Con Colbert, Dublin: O’Brien Press 2015, 23. O’Callaghan’s text is part

of the 16 Lives series and, arguably, is itself a product of renewed interest in the Easter Rising of 1916

engendered by the run-up to the 2016 centenary commemorations.

1111 – Stephanie Rains, Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916, Dublin: Irish Academic

Press 2010, 206–07; see also Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–

1923, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, 207.

1212 – Justin Carville, ‘“Dusty Fingers of Time”: Photography, Material Memory and 1916’, in Making

1916: Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising, ed. Lisa Godson and Joanna Bruck, Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press 2015, 240.

1313 – Patrick O’Mahony and Gerard Delanty, Rethinking Irish History: Nationalism, Identity and Ideology

(1998), Houndsmill: Palgrave 2001, 111–12.

1414 – O’Callaghan, Con Colbert, 92.

1515 – Gerry Beegan, The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian

London, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2008.

1616 – Gail Baylis, ‘The Easter Rising 1916: Photography and Memory’, in Irish Studies and the Dynamics of

Memory: Transitions and Transformations, ed. Marguerite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack, and Rudd van

den Beuken, LondonOxford: Peter Lang 2016, 59–62.2017, 57-79.

1717 – James Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin (1916), introduction and afterword by John A. Murphy,

Gerrards Cross: Colin Smyth 1992, 62.

1818 – Jack Elliot, ‘“After I Am Hanged My Portrait will be Interesting but not Before”: Ephemera and the

Construction of Personal Responses to the Easter Rising’, in Making 1916, ed. Godson and Bruck, 91.

1919 – Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, London: Allen Lane 2005, 173.

2020 – Fearghal McGarry, Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising, Dublin: Penguin Ireland 2011, 293.

2121 – C. S. Andrews, Dublin Made Me: An Autobiography, Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press 1979, 8.

2222 – Letter from William Johnstone, Head of Dublin Metropolitan Police Force to the Under Secretary, 2

June 1916, Joseph Brennan Papers, ‘Miscellaneous Materials […] Relating to the Suppression of Seditious

Literature’, MS 26, 154, Manuscript Reading Room, National Library of Ireland.

2323 – Beegan, The Mass Image, 14 and 5.

2424 – Edwards and Hart, ‘Introduction’, 4.

2525 – Gail Baylis, ‘Remembering to Forget: Marginalised Visual Representations in the Irish Nation

Narrative’, Kyntypa/Culture, 7 (2014), 132.

2626 – Maurice Walsh, The News from Ireland: Foreign Correspondents and the Irish Revolution, London:

I.B. Tauris 2008, 54.

2727 – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981), trans. Richard Howard, London:

Vintage 1993, 85.

2828 – Jack Elliot notes that in the course of his research he found only one Powell postcard that was sent via

the postal system. My own research concurs with such findings and points to how function was overwritten

by memory dictates. Jack Elliot, ‘Communicating Advanced Nationalist Identity in Dublin, 1890–1917’,

PhD thesis, University of Warwick 2012, 204.

2929 – Sean McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1848–1922: Theatres of War, London: Routledge 2003,

437.

3030 – Clair Wills, Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO, London: Profile Books 2009, 10.

3131 – Frank O’Connor, An Only Child, London: Readers Union/Macmillan 1962, 110.

3232 – Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, 207.

3333 – A Month’s Mind is a Catholic Mass for the soul of the departed a month after his or her death.

3434 – Andrews, Dublin Made Me, 89.

3535 – Ibid., 90.

3636 – Sean Farrell Moran, ‘Images, Icons and the Practice of Irish History’, in Images, Icons and the Irish

Imagination, ed. Lawrence W. McBride, Dublin: Four Courts Press 1999, 170.

3737 – See for example MS 13,070/6/6, National Library of Ireland.

3838 – Edwards, ‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’, 226.

3939 – R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890–1923 (2014), London:

Penguin 2015, 248.

4040 – Edwards and Hart, ‘Introduction’, 4.

4141 – O’Callaghan, Con Colbert, 29. A. Radley, ‘Artefacts, Memory and a Sense of the Past’, in Collective

Remembering, ed. David Middleton and Derek Edwards, London: Sage 1990, 52.

4242 – Martin Hand, Ubiquitous Photography, Cambridge: Polity 2012, 132.

4343 – Pat Cooke, ‘History, Materiality and the Myth of 1916’, in Making 1916, ed. Godson and Bruck, 205.

4444 – Letter from William Johnstone, 2 June 1916, Joseph Brennan Papers, ‘Miscellaneous Materials […]

Relating to the Suppression of Seditious Literature’, MS 26, 154, Manuscript Reading Room, National

Library of Ireland.

4545 – The Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook, Easter 1916 [Irish Times], Dublin: Fred Hanna Ltd 1917. MS

33.460F, National Library of Ireland.

4646 – Beegan, The Mass Image, 14.

4747 – The Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook, 64.

4848 – See http://www.whytes.ie/16Main.asp?Auction=20091114&Lot=188&IMAGE=188 (accessed 21

March 2014).

4949 – Ann Wilson, ‘Constructions of Irishness in a Collection of Early Twentieth-Century Picture

Postcards’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 39:1 (2015), 96.

5050 – Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, New York: Princeton

Architectural Press 2004, 49.

5151 – Album 113, Manuscript Reading Room, National Library of Ireland.

5252 – Album 92, Manuscript Reading Room, National Library of Ireland.

5353 – Geoffrey Belknap and Sophie Defrance, ‘Photographs as Scientific and Social Objects in the

Correspondence of Charles Darwin’, in Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information,

ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton, London: Bloomsbury 2015, 150–51.

5454 – Father Augustine, ‘A Priest’s Testimony: Last Moments of Mr C. Colbert’, pasted in newspaper

clipping from the Irish Independent (no date) on the album page dedicated to Con Colbert in the Diarmuid

MacManus album, Album 92, National Library of Ireland, n.p.

5555 – Fearghal McGarry, The Rising Ireland: Easter 1916, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010, 272.

5656 – From the collection of Kathleen Hassett, EPHA616, National Library of Ireland.

5757 – Batchen, Forget Me Not, 97.

5858 – Bal, ‘Visual Essentialism’, 24.

5959 – Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2005, 16.

6060 – See http://www.tg4.ie/en/programmes/1916-seachtar-dearmadta/con-colbert.html (accessed 23

February 2015). The prequel to this series is on the signatories to the Rising.

6161 – Carville, ‘“Dusty Fingers of Time”’, 237.

http://www.tg4.ie/en/programmes/1916-seachtar-dearmadta/con-colbert.html

http://www.whytes.ie/16Main.asp?Auction=20091114&Lot=188&IMAGE=188

6262 – Hand, Ubiquitous Photography, 150.

6363 – Astrid Erll, ‘Travelling Memory’, Parallax, 17:4 (2011), 11–12.

6464 – Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

2010, 12

65 – Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell Stories of People’s Lives, New York: Routledge

1998, 7.

66 – Terdiman, Past Present, 3.

65

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