Magnum Ireland

Magnum Ireland exhibition commissioned by Irish Museum of Modern Art set out to approach the history of Magnum from an Irish perspective. It focused on the role and outputs of Magnum photographers who visited Ireland for professional or personal reasons from the 1950s to present.

Lardinois’ contribution was to conduct extensive background research, secure a book publication to accompany the exhibition, and with the co-curator, to divide both exhibition and book into decades and to commission Irish writers including Anthony Cronin, Fintan O’Toole and Eamonn McCann to set each decade in its historical context. Lardinois and Williams co-wrote a critical introduction to the book which drew out a distinctive Irishness to the photographs and they jointly presented the exhibition at its opening.

Research consisted of the original scoping of the exhibition and volume (Lardinois) and a sustained enquiry into the large number of photographers’ work including those from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds including Hiroji Kubota, Eve Arnold, Erich Hartmann and Mark Power. The research involved identifying and retrieving photographs from a range of non-UK based archives and estates. As a consequence, little of the work had been exhibited before and none of it in a retrospective context.

The exhibition went on to the Ormeau Road Baths Gallery, Belfast from (June – September 2006). Lardinois opened the exhibition on 29 June 2006.

The book co-edited by Lardinois was published by Thames and Hudson (30 November 2005) and was launched at the Irish Embassy, London (8 December 2005).

The Wall Street Journal reviewed the book in the following terms: ‘Hits the very highest note … this collection is so good that I wanted to linger over every picture’; The Sunday Telegraph described the book as “A vibrant survey of Ireland in all its beauty, pain, comedy and complexity’.