Ireland’s broken homes
IT COULD be argued that the Ireland recalled in the photographs of David Creedon does not exist anymore. This was a rural and highly-religious Ireland, one in which money was sparse and was therefore only spent with the greatest of caution. People saved hard for such luxuries as a dresser, a bicycle, a good suit, or a sewing machine.
His new book of photographs, Ghosts of the Faithful Departed, does not record this Ireland, as such, but rather its memory. The interiors he has captured on film are those of dwellings long abandoned, old homes whose contents have been left to moulder and decay. Creedon himself describes this Ireland as that of the 1950s and 1960s; in reality, it survived a lot longer, and in places it still exists, albeit on the edge of expiry, today.
