Ireland in color
A rare vivid look at the Emerald Isle
Alex Q. Arbuckle
1927
In 1927, National Geographic sent staff photographer Clifton R. Adams to Ireland to photograph the way people lived.Adams shot with an early form of color photography called the Autochrome process. Patented in 1903 by the famous Lumière brothers, Autochrome used a layer of potato starch grains dyed red, green and blue, along with a complex development process, to produce a color transparency.Requiring longer exposure times than normal black and white pictures, Autochromes often came out with a slightly blurred, dreamlike quality. Combined with the pointillist dots of color, they often looked like Impressionist paintings.By 1938, Autochrome had been largely abandoned in favor of the faster and easier Kodachrome process.
When Adams visited Ireland in 1927, the country had only recently emerged from the violent years of the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, and the partitioning of the island into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.The country at this time was primarily an agrarian society of tenant farmers, and was still underpopulated following the tremendous death and emigration of the Great Famine of 1842-1852. In 1926 its population was at a historic low of just under 3 million.
