Photo Archive: Iconic images and reports from Cobh

Unless you are a war reporter, a derring-do newspaper photographer or a globe-roving TV cameraman, most Irish journalists would be lucky (or, unlucky in the more relevant human sense) to be witness to an earth-shaking tragedy that makes world-wide waves and repercussions. To be involved in two such events is even more unlikely.

A century ago, The Cork Examiner’s pioneering press photographer Thomas Barker was an observer and a documenter of elements of not just one, but two, early 20th century tragedies of immense proportions and global significance — the sinkings of the Titanic and of the Lusitania — that came to visit Irish shores, with rich and deep resonances to this day, and beyond.

Through the early, tumultuous decades of the last century, my grandfather was a working press photographer and newspaperman with this paper. In fact, it is acknowledged he was the first full-time staff cameraman of any Irish newspaper, having taken up that role in the late 1800s.