Fighting grave indiscipline with a camera: photography and the Irish Civil War

Just as a Civil War was breaking out in Ireland in July 1922, the head of the newly founded Provisional Government wrote to explain to a military official that ‘the censoring of films is more important [than the newspapers], as the pictures have greater personal affect.’
The Irish Civil War has long attracted historians’ attention, but in analysing it, historians have tended to use a rather narrow ‘high political’ framework. Only recently, have some historians such as Gavin Foster, begun to explore the social and cultural history of the Civil War. This paper will explore how the use of photographs can shed light onto the social and cultural history of the Irish Civil War.
This paper will first explore how the camera was consciously used by civil and military authorities in the Irish Civil War to fight ‘grave indiscipline.’ The camera was used as a means of external image projection but also as a means of internal surveillance: and interestingly the two uses often intersected. From this investigation, this paper will then explore some of the merits and drawbacks of using visual methodologies.