The Donegal Pictures

$20.00

Seventy-nine duotone photographs of remote Irish-speaking farming and sheepherding communities; Introduction by Ciaran Carson

About the photographer: Rachel Giese (now Rachel Brown) was born in New York City in 1936, but her family moved around a good bit so she grew up “all over the country.” She studied photography as a private student of Melissa Shook at MIT in 1976, but is largely self-taught. Brown began traveling to Ireland in the late 1970s, drawn to the light, the weather, and the history. Wake Forest University Press published The Donegal Pictures in 1987. Her other works include Sweeney’s Flight (as Rachel Giese, 1992) with poems from Nobel Prize–winner Seamus Heaney, Solstice (as Rachel Brown, 2002) with a foreword by poet Mary Oliver, and various exhibitions and articles. For more information, visit her website.

Photo by Nathalie Dupuy

Reviews

“Rachel Giese’s photographs attend to the speechless life in things and places and people. Donegal is not only recorded here, it is reimagined.”
– Seamus Heaney

“In Rachel Giese’s Donegal we see nature’s big, rough scale—a stony, bony landscape on which the tender people move.”
– Annie Dillard

“These extraordinary Donegal photographs by Rachel Giese represent the heart of the documentary tradition. As John Berger has lived and recorded the lives of French peasants, so Rachel Giese evokes for us a . . . society at the end of an era, and in the everyday lives of these villagers and the sensual light of this place we are able to see ourselves, what we might have been—and still might be.”
– Alex Harris, Director, Center for Documentary Photography