Vision of the Kingdom Sunday, October 25, 2009 By Fiona Ness As head of St Finian’s psychiatric hospital in Killarney, Dr Eamonn O’Sullivan was a master of psychology.
The canny Kerryman led his county to eight All Irelands between 1924 and 1962, a record that may never be equalled.
How did he do it? Kerry photographer Padraig Kennelly says by imbuing his players with a sense that they were making history, before they even set foot on the pitch.
Kennelly travelled with the footballers to the All-Ireland final in Dublin in 1953, 1955 and 1959, where he was under instructions from O’Sullivan to document the players’ entire journey for posterity, not just their match-day achievements. ‘‘He made them feel that they were champions before they ever reached Croke Park,” says the octogenarian photographer, filmmaker and founder of the Kerry newspaper, Kerry’s Eye. ‘‘You knew what you were doing was history.” O’Sullivan taught Kennelly an important lesson: that life shouldn’t be left to slip by unnoticed.
Kennelly began taking pictures in 1953 and in 1956, left the family chemist business to set up a photographic business with his Tralee born wife, Joan. Kodak was the latest thing in photography and from his earliest days, Kennelly says he carefully stored and filed his negatives, at first rolling up 23 films in a Kodak paperbox, before transferring them on to archive freeze in the 1980s and finally, digitising the images with the advent of digital technology.
The Kennellys’ early stock-in trade was photographing dress dancing, first communions, confirmations and football tournaments. ‘‘Electronic flashes had just been invented,” says Kennelly, ‘‘enticing photographers to bring the camera to the people, rather than people to the camera.”
When, in 1974, Tralee was besieged by flooding, the Kennellys established a freesheet, Kerry’s Eye, to campaign on local issues - and their’ career in photojournalism began. Already in possession of a printing press, it wasn’t long before they began charging for the newspaper.
‘‘After two months, we put a price on it because there were too many people looking for six copies for people in America. It was 12p.
The only paper that was dearer was the Sunday Times, which was 15p at the time. We used colour on the front and inside. It didn’t increase our costs because we did all our colour separation ourselves,” he says.
Half a century after he began taking photos, Kerry’s Eye is still going strong and Kennelly has amassed a treasure trove of images which detail an Ireland that is gone forever. This year, as the camera itself celebrates its 170thbirthday, he is making his family’s extensive photography collection publicly available, both in book and online format.
It has been, he says, a painstaking process of choosing, cleaning up, processing and archiving more than 162,000 images. The result is an astounding and beautiful photo-documentary project.
A man lights a fag against the wind on Banna Strand, his ditched bicycle resting against the anchor of the Oranmore, a ship abandoned off Kerry Head and beached after five days of storms in February 1970. Stocious revellers at the puck fair in Killorglin, Co Kerry, sit slumped, their faces wrinkled like wet chamois as they glug on bottles of Bulmers.
A young boy in knitted shorts and top helps himself from a barrel of stout at a family wedding. And Charles J Haughey, minister for lands and fisheries, eats freshly caught lobster off the coast of Dingle when visiting the Kingdom to ‘‘hear about some of the county’s fishing problems’’. The Kennellys’ time-trapped images drop like pebbles into a clear pool.
Despite the obvious hardship experienced by many of the people in the photographs, overwhelmingly, the book is one of smiling faces. Even the children from the industrial school photographed by Kennelly are beaming. The reason for this, he says, was down to one of his rules of good photography:
‘‘If you smile at the subject, they smile back at you.”
‘‘The brothers would ask me up to cover events at the school,” he says. ‘‘I had no concept of the terrible things going on behind the scenes. It wasn’t even possible to conceive that such crimes were being committed. Only with the discovery that Eamon Casey had feet of clay, did people begin to talk about their experiences.”
The strength of the Kennelly archive is rooted in the partnership Kennelly had with his photographer wife, Joan, who died of cancer after a short illness in 2006. Kennelly had known Joan as a photographer in Kerry before she went to Spain to teach English to airline pilots in the early 1950s.
On her return, the couple met and were married within six months.
‘‘It would have been three months if I’d had my way,” smiles Kennelly. ‘‘It was a good partnership; it couldn’t have been better. When we had the freesheet, I was the writer and Joan was the advertising collector. She was able to persuade people to book an ad once a month for a year, and they’d pay by banker’s order - so it meant we were financially secure for a year.”
Could the beleaguered advertising industry today learn from his wife’s methods? ‘‘They’d have to smile like Joan to get people to sign up like that,” he says.
The Kennellys worked furiously in order to keep the spectre of emigration from the door. ‘‘I saw a huge number of people emigrate,” says Kennelly. ‘‘We spent a huge amount of the day taking passport pictures. We wondered would there be anyone left to take ours.
‘‘We were a mixed society, and it’s the sort of society we have to return to during the recession now,” says Kennelly. ‘‘There wasn’t much difference between the poor and very poor. Everyone had to have a way of supplementing their income. A lot of people had allotments; those who had strips of turf didn’t have to buy fuel. Those who didn’t have strips would volunteer to work in the bogs and get fuel in return.”
The couple also began a postcard business, which became the largest of its kind in Ireland. As a result there are also over 11,000 picture postcards in the Kennelly collection. ‘‘We had two VWs and we would travel the country - she would sell and I would snap. We both did the same mileage each day, 250 miles,” Kennelly says.
While raising four sons - Padraig Jnr, Brendan, Jerry and Kerry - Joan became the backbone of the Kennellys’ businesses, which also supplied news photographs and television footage to Irish and international news agencies.
Her loss to the family today is palpable. ‘‘Joan was a victim of an addiction to tobacco,” says Kennelly, who himself ‘‘lit 100 cigarettes a day’’.
‘‘I wouldn’t say I smoked them. Until tipped cigarettes came along in 1962, the cigarette would go out if you didn’t smoke it. I threw my cigarettes away, I think in the early 80s.There’s been so many years and they pass by so quick, I’m not sure of time.”
Despite himself now tolerating cancer, Kennelly continues to pen news and editorials for Kerry’s Eye. The newspaper is run now by his sons Padraig, Brendan and Kerry, while his other son, Jerry, is founder of picture agency Stockbyte - which he sold to Getty in 2006 for $135 million.
Jerry Kennelly has said of his father that he is a creative genius who was also confident enough to empower other people. He showed hi s sons that ‘‘there’s nothing that’s impossible.
There are always plenty of great excuses why something won’t work, but you can’t allow them to stop you. It’s all about tenacity,” Jerry Kennelly has said.
‘‘At the age of 21, thanks to him, I had the equivalent of an MBA, but with no real academic qualifications to speak of. I was ready to take on the world.”
As for his father, he’s still taking on the world, still taking photographs. ‘‘I am captivated by scenery, but it’s not urgent work now.
More important is work on this section of the Kennelly archive, which will go on for another year,” Kennelly says. ‘‘I hope to be around to cast an eye on it.”
Eyewitness – Padraig & Joan Kennelly’s Images of Ireland:
1953 to 1973, is published by the Kennelly Archive, priced €29.95.
A collector’s edition is available through Kennellyarchive.com, priced €49.95. www.kennelly archive.com goes live on October 29
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