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 Page 1
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 2
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.
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 3
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).
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 4
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 5
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 6
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 7
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 8
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 9
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 10
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 11
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 12
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 13
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 14
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 15
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 16
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.
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 17
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.
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 18
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 19
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 20
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
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 21
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.
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 22
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.
History of Photography peer review 24 August 2016 Page 23
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.
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.
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
66