September 17, 2024 // Diocese

ND Museum Hosts Photos Made by Renowned Irish Priest

Paula Lent

In late August, the University of Notre Dame’s Raclin Murphy Museum of Art premiered the first exhibition of photography by Jesuit Father Francis Browne in the United States. Featuring 100 photographs, it’s among the largest collections of Father Browne’s photography to be shown anywhere.

Due to the discovery of his negatives 25 years after his death, Father Browne has posthumously become one of the most famous Irish photographers from the early 20th century. His knack for capturing people and places in a way that is simple and conveys the delight he took in them offers a unique perspective of a bygone era.

“There’s a real sense of nostalgia in the shots that’s really nice. It makes them easy to understand and easy to like.” said David Acton, Ph.D., the Curator of Photographs for the Raclin Murphy Museum and the man responsible for the museum’s acquisition of Browne’s photos.

“He tried to keep up with photographic technology and style, but he was always, I’d say, a couple of decades behind,” Acton told Today’s Catholic. “American photographers were sort of 20 years ahead of English photographers, who were 20 years ahead of Irish photographers, and Father Browne is even probably behind [that].”

Father Browne, therefore, wasn’t exploring modernism or expressionism; rather, he was very much capturing real life. “They’re wonderful images, and fun and humorous a lot of the time,” Acton said.

“He always keeps those old, traditional, 19th-century ideals of what art is, which essentially involves telling a story,” Acton added. “So almost all of his pictures tell a story. They tell a story of a place, a time, what somebody did, what he’s looking at.”

Father Browne was particularly drawn to capturing the countryside, children, and sports.

“He was a good athlete and loved sports,” Acton shared. “He loved going to school sports days. He would go and hang out and watch kids in school competitions and country fairs and things like that where they had sort of jumping and running competitions, and there are a couple of pictures of kids Irish dancing and Irish musicians.”

A city-bred man, Father Browne made use of his clerical appointment in Dublin later in life in order to take photographic jaunts into the countryside to explore.

“He got a bicycle, loaded it onto trains, and went out and rode around these little Irish communities. And for the first time, he was exploring different parts of the country, different topographies, different villages, different ways people live, people talk, different costumes,” Acton said. “So those are the kinds of stories he’s telling; and he has a wicked sense of humor. … He’s a really interesting, really funny guy. I think he must have been really fun to be around.”

Father Browne’s photographs convey that he was a man with a clear interest in life and a love for discovering the beauty in the people and places around him. Fittingly, he also led an interesting life, and it’s thanks to a fortuitous discovery – and the prolonged work of a father and son duo – that we have his beautiful photos to enjoy today.

An Extraordinary Life

Born in 1880, the eighth child of a wealthy family in Cork, Ireland, Francis Mary Hegarty Browne received an impressive education by way of Catholic boarding schools, secondary school, and the Royal University in Dublin, where he was a contemporary of James Joyce. He entered the Jesuit novitiate after secondary school and soon after became the ward of his uncle, Robert Browne, who was the bishop of Cloyne.

“He grew up in a wealthy family, went to a stodgy prep school, and learned Latin and Greek when he was a little boy,” Acton said. “So he was kind of an upper-class figure – upper class in a social sense and upper class because he was not only a Jesuit priest but he was the nephew of a bishop, so he was a real sort of aristocrat within the Church and within the culture.”

But his aristocratic inheritance seemed to have produced no ill characteristics in his nature. To the contrary, he was deeply devoted to his faith and gave his life in service to others.

Not long after his ordination in 1915, Father Browne became a chaplain in the Irish Guards in 1917, serving in World War I. As a chaplain, he – and his camera – went right to the front lines. “Most of the images tell a story of a battle or a battlefield or what people were going through or what equipment they were using,” Acton said of the wartime photographs.

“He spent a lot of time on the front lines dealing with the wounded and the dead,” Acton shared. “And many people said he was the bravest person they’d ever met because he had no fear because of his faith. So he would go out in no man’s land and hail bullets to help a wounded man. And he was wounded five times, and he was gassed. So he was incredibly brave; he was always there to help the men. And he ministered to the men no matter their religion.”

In order to recuperate from the effects of mustard gas on his lungs, Father Browne was sent to Australia, where he enjoyed documenting his new surroundings with his camera as he ministered to people in small towns near Raleigh. When he returned to Ireland, he served as Superior of St. Francis Xavier Church in Dublin from 1925 to 1930, and afterwards closed out his career working in a retreat ministry.

Acton explains: “So he and a group of Jesuit ministers would actually go around the country, and sometimes to England, sort of giving retreats and meeting people and leading priests and nuns in study on these retreats, and then being a sort of a visiting preacher, essentially. So he’s going around [to] different levels of society, preaching and meeting people. … He did this for most of his career. And when he did that, he had a camera with him.”

Father Browne also had a camera with him when he embarked on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. He disembarked in Ireland before the Titanic hit the North Atlantic, and his photos became famous through their use in newspapers worldwide after the ship sunk.

Restoration

Apart from his photos of the Titanic, his photos were largely unseen until Jesuit Father Eddie O’Donnell found a trunk filled with his negatives in the basement of a Jesuit house. Having been given a lifetime supply of film by Kodak in the 1930s, Father Browne had been a relatively unconstrained photographer; the trunk contained around 42,000 negatives.

Throughout the next 20 years, Father O’Donnell sorted through them and published a number of photo books, many of which are available in the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame.

Unsure what to do with all the negatives, however, the Jesuits got in touch with David Davison, a photographic conservator in Dublin. Davison and his son, Edwin, then spent decades transferring the negatives from the flammable nitrate film they were on, digitizing, and cataloging them. Edwin Davison will speak at the Raclin Museum on Wednesday, September 25, sharing about Father Browne’s life, the discovery of his works, and the restoration process.

When Acton learned of the photos from colleagues at the National Gallery in Dublin, he connected with Edwin, eventually visiting him in his Wicklow studio where Acton made a selection of 100 prints for Notre Dame.

“I said, wow, this is really perfect for Notre Dame,” Acton recalls. “I knew that to have these in our collection would be useful for Notre Dame, not only to show and to enjoy in the university community, but also to study. I [selected] things that would be useful for [the] Irish Studies [institute]. So this is meant to be a study collection and one for the enjoyment of the university community.”

When asked what he loves the most about the collection, Acton reflected: “I think it’s interesting because it’s sort of one person’s discovery of a wonderful place – a wonderful country and culture. It’s sort of one person’s view of something that … he could make memories of. There’s a lot of pictures of the things that he discovered and seems to have loved and enjoyed. And so it seems to me to reflect a sort of a personality that is fascinated visually with the people, but also with the places and the culture. … And it’s the kind of Ireland that Notre Dame Irish Catholics like to think of themselves as being part of.”