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The arresting officers did not charge himwith any offence; at most, they may havetold him that they believed him to be amember of the Irish RepublicanBrotherhood or Fenians and that, under theterms of the Habeas Corpus Suspension(Ireland) Act (29 & 30 Vict., c. 119), hecould be detained at the Lord Lieutenant’spleasure. Berry had probably never heard ofthe legislation; the bill that allowed hisdetention without charge had only beenbrought before parliament the previousevening, and it is possible that at the time ofhis arrest it had not yet received the royalassent, formally making it law. Initiallyconfined in Mountjoy Jail in north inner-city Dublin, Berry was transferred fourweeks later to Antrim County Jail onBelfast’s Crumlin Road. Before his transfer,warders in Mountjoy recorded his basicbiographical and descriptive information(Fig. 1). They asked him his age,occupation, residence, place of birth,religion and whether he could read andwrite; noted his facial features; measured hisheight and told him to strip for a physicalexamination. They also asked him to sit fora photograph. Berry answered thequestions, allowed the examination and satfor his ‘likeness.’

Berry’s photograph is important. It may nothave been the young cotton-spinner’s firstencounter with a camera; working-class menand women had increasing access tophotography due to the proliferation of

cheap portrait studios in the late 1850s. ButBerry’s experience of being photographed asa prisoner was unusual. Prison authoritieshad been routinely photographing men andwomen entering convict prisons in Irelandsince 1860, but photography would notbecome a routine part of the processing ofconvicts elsewhere in the United Kingdomuntil the 1870s. Moreover, Berry, unlike theprisoners photographed in Dublin over theprevious six years, had not been convictedof any offence; he was an internee, a personarrested without charge and lodged in jailwithout the prospect of a trial on the basisof the authorities’ suspicion about hispolitical beliefs and activities. Berry wasultimately discharged from Crumlin Roadafter two hundred and six days in custodyon condition that he leave for England and,it was understood, not return to Ireland.His photograph and descriptive details were retained, not only by the prisonauthorities but also by the IrishConstabulary, facilitating his identificationand surveillance in the future.1

A few months before the Mountjoyauthorities started to photograph internees(Fig. 2) like Berry, they had begun tophotograph men on remand awaiting trialfor Fenian-related activity; men sentenced topenal servitude for Fenian-related offenceswere already being photographed asconvicted felons. Together, these ‘FenianPhotographs’ (internees, remand prisonersand convicts) form a remarkable archive of

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Fenians in the FramePhotographing Irish Political Prisoners, 1865–68Breandán Mac Suibhne and Amy Martin

The Dublin Metropolitan Police arrested Thomas Berry,a twenty-year-old cotton-spinner living on Thomas Streetin the city’s Liberties, on 17 February 1866.

1 On Berry, see NationalArchives of Ireland, ChiefSecretary’s OfficeRegistered Papers1866/16991; FenianPhotographs 16; IrishCrime Records 13.Although his surnameappears as ‘Barry’ on theform opposite, mostrecords give it as ‘Berry’.

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Fig. 1: Detail of Form K andprison photograph filed forThomas Berry, interned fromFebruary to September 1866.NAI, FP 16

images of mostly working-class men.2

Critically, they were not taken to satisfy aphysiognomist’s gaze, and hence they cannotbe easily assimilated into histories of crimeor photography in which criminal or racialanthropology provides the impetus for thephotographing of prisoners. Rather, thissystematic photographing of politicalprisoners was primarily for the purpose ofintelligence, surveillance and thedocumentation of potential insurgents and,as such, it constituted a significantencroachment by the state on its subjects’rights and a radical shift in the use ofphotographic technology. Previously,photography had been associated with thestaging of identity through portraiture andwith the ‘private’ transactions of desire andaffection that were signified by the exchangeof such images. It now became anothermode by which the state laid claim to theself and to the representation anddisciplining of potentially unruly or‘terrorist’ bodies.3 These photographs ofFenians, therefore, represent a criticalmoment in the history of photography andits deployment by the state. They also existas an important genealogical fragment thatilluminates the foundational connectionsbetween modern state-formation, anti-terrorism, the problem of rights, and thestate’s use of visual technology.

I

Photography was an invention of the late1830s and early 1840s. By the mid-1840s,portrait studios were in operation in majorcities across Europe and North America,and the exchange of ‘photographiclikenesses’ was fast becoming a fashionabledisplay of affection (Fig. 3).4 At the sametime, practitioners of several branches of‘science’ sought to codify various forms ofdeviance as they were written on the body,and photography became central to theirefforts. Physiognomists, phrenologists, andracial anthropologists used the camera todocument, classify and interpret the bodies,

particularly the faces, of subjects such asmental patients and indigents and tocompare them to the bourgeois ideal of the‘average’ or the ‘normal’.5 In this context,police and prison officials were soonexperimenting with the new technology andphotographing people in their custody. TheBrussels police took photographs ofcriminals in 1843–44; Mathew Bradyphotographed inmates of two New Yorkprisons in 1846; and by the mid-1850sLouis Mathurin Moreau-Christophe, theinspector of prisons in Alsace, had proposeda biométrophotographique system for thedocumentation of convicts.

Such early efforts, however, were scatteredand short-lived. Furthermore, they shared aphysiognomic imperative, being largelyconcerned with the representation of aparticular criminal type and withdocumenting the signs of criminality on thebodies of convicts. It was not until the1870s that police and prison authoritiesbegan to institutionalize the use ofphotography for the purposes ofidentification, notably in France, Englandand New York City. The photographing ofradical prisoners in France was a key eventin this process. Communards in the prisonsof Versailles were asked to sit forphotographs after the suppression of theParis Commune in 1871. These photographsgenerally showed the sitter from the waistup, as in a standard portrait, but they wereintended for police files; portraitphotography was being pressed into theservice of intelligence. Although theCommunards were initially allowed to buytheir likenesses, the French Ministry of theInterior soon imposed restrictions on theirsale; for photographs of prisoners to servetheir new functions, their circulation aspolitical portraits and as expressions of aninsurgent ideology had to be controlled.6

Over the next decade, repressive agencies inseveral locations set increasingly rigid rulesand guidelines for the photographing ofprisoners. By the 1880s, the frontal-profile

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2 There are photographs ofrepublican prisoners in the‘Irish Crime Records’ and‘Fenian Photographs’collections in the NationalArchives of Ireland. Thelatter collection contains509 files but not all ofthem contain photographsand not all of thephotographs are ofFenians; documents (manyof them with photographs)concerning Feniansinterned in 1866–68account for 249 of thefiles; the remainder aremainly photographs ofother Fenian prisoners(remands and convicts) in1866–68; descriptions,rarely with photographs,of Fenians active in Britainin the late 1860s and early1870s, and portraits ofpolitical figures in the1880s. On theconservation of thecollection, see NiamhMcGuinne, ‘The FenianPhotographs in theNational Archives’,IPCRA Journal (Spring2004), 23–25. There arealso photographs ofrepublican suspects andprisoners among thepapers of Dublin Castleofficials and seniorpolicemen: see NationalLibrary of Ireland, MS5957 [Samuel LeeAnderson Album,1865–71]; Larcom PapersMS 7698; Album no. 37.

3 John Tagg, The Burden ofRepresentation: Essays onPhotography and History(Amherst, 1988)documents this transition.

4 Jennifer Green-Lewis,Framing the Victorians:Photography and theCulture of Realism(Ithaca, 1996), 52–53;Audrey Linkman, TheVictorians: PhotographicPortraits (London, 1993),30–31

0 100 km

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Prisoners per 100,000population (1871)

300

200

100

50

Total number of arrests Fig. 2: HCSA Prisoners, 1866–68Source: NAI, CSO ICR 13

The police made 1,153 arrests under the HCSA fromFebruary 1866 to mid-summer 1868; there were fewinternment orders from then until the restoration ofhabeas corpus in spring 1869. Over half of all arrestswere made within a month of the enactment of thelegislation; there were also large numbers of arrests inDecember 1866 (when the authorities believed a risingas imminent), in March 1867 (the aftermath of theFenian Rising), and June 1867 (the aftermath of theErin’s Hope gun-running expedition). Men in their teensand twenties predominated among those interned but asurprising number of older men saw the inside of jails;the average age of internees was twenty-seven and 28per cent of internees were over thirty. The youngest weretwo fifteen-year-olds and the eldest two seventy-year-olds. Periods of internment ranged from a few days toseveral months, the average internment lasting 157 days.Over half of the internees (607) were released on givingbail; 14 on condition that they ‘leave Ireland’ and afurther 390 on agreeing to go to a named country,generally America (258), England (124), and Scotland(4). The most unusual destinations stipulated forreleased internees were Italy (Nicholas Walsh, a Dublin-based artist); Australia (Richard Rogers, a youngTipperary farmer); New Zealand (Darragh Daniel, aschoolmaster in Ballycastle, county Antrim); andArchangel, Russia (Thomas Whittle, a Waterford sailor).Four internees died in custody, three turned informerand one escaped. Revisionist historians have argued thatinternment ‘wreaked havoc’ on the IRB: see R. V.Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics andSociety 1848–82 (Dublin, rev. edn. 1998), 133.Nevertheless, the detention of men without trial (and thedeath of men in custody) generated considerable publicsympathy — 40,000 people attended the funeral ofBelfast internee William Harbinson — and prisonconditions became the subject of a public debate thatenergized the amnesty campaign of the late 1860s.Certainly, some Fenians saw advantages in thesuspension of habeas corpus. Writing in summer 1867,‘A Looker-On’ argued that it exposed the folly ofconstitutional activity: ‘The suspension of habeas corpusact I regard with complaisance. It is an advantage tohave unmasked a battery. The habeas corpus act can nolonger be a trap; men know the worst, and standprepared for it at all times. They know that personalfreedom is not worth an hour’s purchase in Ireland. In aword, they stand face to face with absolutism worsethan Russian in Poland. Open and avowed speaking andagitation and so forth, thank heaven, is dead now; thereis no real Irishman ignorant of what he owes to himselfand to his country, or of the virtue of perseverance.’ SeeIrishman, 10 Aug. 1867.

photograph of an individual against a blankbackground had been standardized, and allsigns of any conflation of portraiture andprison photography had been purged. Thestate had developed the mugshot.7

The Irish experience is different, however.Britain’s colonies often served aslaboratories for new technologies of powerbefore their deployment in the home-country and, much as colonialadministrators in India pioneered finger-printing, those in Dublin Castle wereprecocious proponents of prisonphotography. With the Castle’s support, thedirectors of the Irish convict prisons wereexperimenting with photography as early as1857; from the end of 1860, all men and,apparently, all women condemned to penalservitude and processed through Mountjoy,the central convict depot, were required tosit for a photograph. Prison officialsconceived these photographs as an‘appliance for the obstruction of crime’. Bycirculating prisoners’ likenesses to thegovernors of county and borough jails, theMountjoy authorities hoped to establish ifthey had any prior convictions; earliermisdemeanours would be added to theirrecords, affecting both the conditions inwhich they were held and their hopes ofearly release. If a person were convicted asecond time, the Mountjoy governor senthis photograph to the inspector general ofthe Irish Constabulary. By the mid-1860s,photographing was also part of the routineprocessing of convicts in many local prisonswhich held less serious offenders.8

Besides becoming part of the processing ofconvicts at a comparatively early date inIreland, photography took a crucial turnwhen untried prisoners began to bephotographed in Dublin jails in 1865–66.The photographing of Fenian remandprisoners from late 1865, and interneesfrom the following spring, was part of ageneral tightening of prison security afterthe escape of James Stephens, head centre of

the IRB, from Dublin’s Richmond Jail inNovember 1865. But, more particularly, itwas a product of the administration’s needfor enhanced surveillance to combat theunprecedented threat posed by the Fenians.The United Kingdom was now confrontingan insurgent network that was organizedinternationally and intent on strikingagainst the state’s interests both within andbeyond its borders. Moreover, theinsurgents included citizens of a friendlystate (mainly returned emigrants from theUnited States) whose lengthy detentionwithout trial or severe punishment,including exile — particularly if notconvicted of any offence — would be highlycontroversial (Fig. 4). Hence, the Castleapproved new measures of intelligence andsurveillance. Mountjoy warders receivedinstructions to complete Form K — a formpreviously used to record biographical anddescriptive details after a prisoner had beenconvicted — for ‘untried prisoners’ or morecorrectly for those untried prisonerssuspected of involvement in the IRB;

5 For a discussion of early‘scientific’ uses ofphotography, see AllenSekula, ‘The Body and theArchive’, in RichardBolton, ed., The Contest ofMeaning (Cambridge,Mass., 1996), 342–89.

6 Donald E. English,Political Uses ofPhotography in the ThirdFrench Republic, 1871–1914 (Ann Arbor, 1984), 65

7 Here we draw on thediscussion of the mugshotin Robert A. Sobieszek,Ghost in the Shell:Photography and theHuman Soul, 1850–2000:Essays on CameraPortraiture (Cambridge,Mass., 1999), 113–19, andMichel Frizot, ‘Body ofEvidence: The Ethnographyof Difference’, in Frizot,ed., The New History ofPhotography (Köln, 1998),259–71.

8 Our discussion here drawson Peadar Slattery, ‘Uses ofPhotography in Ireland,1839–1900’, 3 vols.(unpublished PhDdissertation, TrinityCollege, Dublin, 1992).

9 For an overview, seeSlattery, ‘Uses ofPhotography in Ireland’,vol. 1, 233–38. Slatterydates the photographing ofinternees to June 1866.However, prisonphotographs of interneesreleased before that datesurvive; also Form Kscompleted for someinternees released beforeJune note that they hadrefused to sit for aphotograph. See forexample, NAI, FP 347(Michael McDooley, 15Apr.); 122 (JohnO’Donoghue, 16 Apr.); 478(John Sullivan, 16 Apr.);257 (James Kinsella, 20Apr.) and 322 (JohnMurtagh, 15 May); onlyMurtagh sat for aphotograph. For the releasedates, see NAI, ICR 13.

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Fig. 3: An undated portrait(c. 1866) archived among theFenian Photographs, presumablyhaving been confiscated by theIrish Constabulary, inscribed‘Truly and fraternally yoursFrank J. Brennan, 1st Lt. N.Y.V.Infantry’ [New York VolunteerInfantry]. NAI, FP 29

the prison governor was to return a copy ofthe form to the inspector general of the IrishConstabulary with a photograph. Forreasons that remain unclear, however, the administration initially balked atcompelling the untried prisoners to sit forphotographs like convicted men; warderscould request but not require them to havetheir pictures taken.9

Completion of Form K — the written recordof identity that accompanied mostphotographs — demanded the co-operationof the prisoner, who had to respond to aseries of questions and then strip for anexamination in which his physical featureswould be noted. There was occasionalresistance to the questioning but nothingvery serious. A number of prisoners, mainlyAmericans, persisted in the use of aliaseseven when the police and prison authoritieswere aware of their real names, while othersrefused to answer certain questions or gavefalse answers when asked for their addressor the addresses of their friends. Thequestion about religion — the only questionabout belief — caused particular friction.Remand prisoner John Murphy (an alias ofthe prominent Fenian John O’Leary),although not an atheist, refused to chooseone of the designated religions (Church ofIreland, Presbyterian, or Roman Catholic)when being processed in Mountjoy; he wasplaced in a punishment cell on a bread andwater diet.10 Less defiantly, if morehumorously, Joseph Byrne, a Dublin gas-worker and father of three children,interned in December 1867, responded‘Roman Catholic while in this place’ whenasked his religion in the same jail (Fig. 5).11

Certainly, the issue animated discussion inthe prisons. In autumn 1867, The Irishman,

a republican weekly, carried an account oflife in Kilmainham by an internee whosigned himself ‘Mickey Halpin’; the authorwas most probably General William G.Halpin, an officer in the US army and oneof the few internees convicted of anyoffence. Halpin singled out the questionabout religion as particularly vexatious:

Strange enough, every newcomer has toregister himself as professing somereligion, and he is left the choice ofembracing the established faith ofEngland or Rome. Outside of these thereseems to be no redemption; so we haveto swallow either the Thirty-nine Articlesand a she-Pope, or acknowledge theBabylonian lady as our guide.

Noting that many Fenian prisoners had littleregard for chaplains, having encounteredthem in ‘other branches of public service’(meaning the Union army), he gave theprison clergymen a back-handedcompliment by saying that they were lessthan zealous in their efforts to flog theircommodity (religion):

One thing can be said in favour of thechaplains, that they do not persecute theprisoners with their orthodox teaching,seeming not to care too much whetherthe sheep of this fold stray to heaven bythemselves, or take the broad road that issaid to lead to the other place. With thistacit understanding, the prisoners arewell-content, most of them having hadample experience of chaplains in otherbranches of public service, and believingthat religion, like other marketablecommodities, can be had at any time forits fair equivalent in hard cash.12

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Fig. 4: Daniel J. Buckley, 23,single, jeweller and former Unionsoldier. American-born Buckleyhad sailed from New York on 13April 1867 on the Erin’s Hope,an 81ft brigantine carrying arms,ammunition and fifty Americanveterans. Weather had preventedthe vessel from landing theweapons but many of the men onboard came ashore, mainly atHelvic Head, county Waterfordon 1 June 1867; most were soonpicked up by the Constabularyand, despite being US citizens,detained under the HCSA.Buckley turned informer andacted as a crown witness in thetrials of several participants inthe expedition, includingAugustine E. Costello (convictedof treason felony and sentencedto twelve years in 1867 butreleased in 1869 under agovernment amnesty) who laterbecame the official historian ofthe New York police and firedepartments. NAI, FP 37Fig. 5: Joseph Byrne, 26, marriedwith three children; brass-founder in Hibernian Gas Works,Great Brunswick Street, Dublin;resident at 2 Clarendon Street;arrested under HCSA on 19December 1866 and released onbail on 4 February 1867; hisForm K notes a ‘mark orresemblance of a cut on top offorehead’. NAI, FP 47

10 Anon., Things NotGenerally KnownConcerning England’sTreatment of PoliticalPrisoners (Dublin, 2ndedn. 1869), 24; Seán McConville, IrishPolitical Prisoners,1848–1922 (London,2002), 151n.46

11 NAI, FP 47 (Byrne)

Among the most obstructive prisoners wereJohn Flood and John McCafferty, twoAmerican veterans centrally placed in theFenian leadership, who were arrested underthe HCSA in Dublin in February 1867.Flood, claiming his name was John Phillips,gave false answers to some of the questionson Form K. He said that he was a sailor,gave Dublin as his place of birth (but couldnot say what part of the city) and insistedthat he was a resident of the Isle of Manand that his ‘friends’ all lived in Australia.McCafferty, processed after him, was evenmore uncooperative: he gave his name asWilliam Jackson, answered the biographicalquestions — also claiming to be a seaman,‘lately travelling’ — but refused to submit tothe physical examination. After recordinghis hair colour and facial features (eyes,eyebrows, nose, mouth, complexion, visage)on a Form K, the turnkey noted that ‘henow protests against his descriptions beingtaken’ and left blank the spaces for his‘make’ and height.13

Flood and McCafferty were exceptions;extant Form Ks indicate that most prisonersstripped for the physical examination.Concerned to identify individuals as unique,the turnkeys paid considerable attention to‘marks on the person’, a category thatincluded everything from pimples anddimples to blotches, scalds and scrofulamarks, missing teeth, pierced ears, varicoseveins and cupped breasts. For instance, theForm K completed for Patrick Andrews, aniron-founder’s apprentice from ThomasStreet, Dublin, records ‘a small mole underleft-ear on neck; teeth decayed in upper jawin front of mouth; a small blue mark onleft-hand; and small finger a little crooked’.

Likewise, the form filed on Thomas Barr ofKillygordon, county Donegal, arrested inDublin shortly after returning fromAmerica, notes a ‘small mole over his righteyebrow’ and a ‘brown mole on the insideof right thigh’. Warders took great interestin wounds, common on the bodies ofAmerican veterans (Fig. 6). The warder whoexamined Michael McDooley, the son of aWaterford city shopkeeper and ‘late of theAmerican army’, noticed a bayonet woundon his right jaw, a gunshot wound on hisleft shoulder and a fracture on the left sideof his head; McDooley refused to sit for aphotograph. Similarly, the warder whoexamined Anthony J. Gill, a native ofWestport, county Mayo who had served inthe American navy, observed a ‘large hole’in his right jaw (Fig. 7). The turnkeys couldbe quite meticulous. It was a very alertwarder, for instance, who noted a bulletwound on the left instep of John Dunne ofFethard, county Tipperary; Dunne had beena 1st Lieutenant in the 23rd Regiment, US Volunteers.14

Tattoos, considered by police and prisonauthorities to be among the most reliabledistinguishing marks, also attracted thewarders’ attention (Fig. 8). The mostcommon forms of bodily decoration weresimple crosses, circles, stars and dots on thehands or arms and rings on the third orfourth finger of the left hand, a mark ofattachment much like a wedding ring. A fewmen also had their initials tattooed on theirarms. Gill, the man with the hole in his jaw,had the letters A. J. G. as well as a heartand a cross on his left arm. Seamen andmen with associated occupations were themost heavily tattooed, anchors and ships

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12 ‘A Voice from the Prison’,a letter dated 1 Oct. 1867in Irishman, 19 Oct.1867. For anotheraccount of conditions inKilmainham, seeIrishman, 20 Jul. 1867.For an extended accountof conditions in Mountjoy,see ‘Mountjoy PrisonLife’, in Irishman, 11Jan.; 18 Jan.; 25 Jan.; 1Feb.; 8 Feb.; 15 Feb.1868; the author hadbeen arrested under theHCSA in Roscommon.Conditions were worse inprisons outside Dublin; on Ennis and Galwayjails, see a letter fromCorrofin in Irishman, 15Feb. 1868.

13 NAI, FP 230(McCafferty), 427(Flood)

14 NAI, FP 7 (Andrews), 11(Barr), 141 (Dunne), 185(Gill), 347 (McDooley)

Fig. 6: John Cade, 22, single,bar boy and late of the US army.A native of Drogheda, countyLouth, who had emigrated toNew York, his Form K notes agunshot wound on his left side.Cade had returned to Ireland onthe Erin’s Hope and wasarrested on 5 June 1867 inWaterford; he was released on 3March 1868 on condition thathe would return to America.NAI, FP 51Fig. 7: Anthony J. Gill, 22,single, grocer’s assistant,formerly a sailor in the US navy. A native of Westport, countyMayo, Gill was arrested underthe HCSA on 13 December1866 and lodged in CastlebarJail and later transferred toMountjoy; he had a large holein his right jaw and a heart, across and A. J. G. tattooed onhis left arm. NAI, FP 185

being common (Fig. 9); for example, FrancisMcClelland, a Belfast shipwright, hadanchors on both hands, a ring on one of thefingers of his left hand and tattoos all overhis arms. There were some quite elaboratedesigns, again mainly on seamen. JamesLawless, a Dublin-born cooper, arrestednear Dungarvan, county Waterford, had awoman, a bird and a ship on his right-armwhile the tattoos on Edward Toomey, anative of Callan, county Kilkenny who hadserved as a storekeeper in the US Navy,hinted at political commitment: he had awoman, a harp and shamrock on his rightarm (Fig. 10).15

Although the physical examination ofprisoners was largely incident-free —perhaps as it had connotations of a medicalexamination — photographing provedcontroversial. From the outset, prisonersoccasionally ‘refused to sit’ for theirphotograph when they were being processedin Mountjoy or Kilmainham. However, theauthorities made it compulsory in summer1867 when, in the aftermath of the FenianRising, numbers of untried prisonersobjected to having their picture taken. The exact number who refused to sit isunknown: some men refused and thenrelented prior to their release; the files onmany men do not survive. However, 13 ofsome 249 internees whose Form Ks are inthe ‘Fenian Photographs’ collection in theNational Archives of Ireland — just over 5per cent of all such forms in the collection— are known to have refused to bephotographed. Significantly, almost half ofthese men had served in either the Union orConfederate armies in the Civil War and, assuch, may have had a more developed sense

than civilian prisoners of the rights ofindividuals in relation to the state-apparatus.16 Moreover, several of them (likeMcCafferty and Flood) were processedthrough Mountjoy together, as indicated bytheir prison numbers, thus revealing theirrefusal to have been an organized action. Ingeneral, however, prisoners complied withthe request (later the requirement) to sit fora photograph. Although some suspects glareat the camera, others seem to have enjoyedthe experience. Morgan Burke, a butcherarrested under the HCSA in January 1867,laughed at the camera (Fig. 11); a native ofDunmanway, county Cork, Burke hadrecently returned from America. PatrickWaters, a poulterer from Great BritainStreet, Dublin, also laughed (Fig. 12), whilePatrick J. Haybyrne, a hairdresser onDublin’s Thomas Street, and ThomasGallagher, a Roscommon student, struckfetching poses (Fig. 13).17

Notwithstanding their early adoption of thenew technology, prison authorities (and thepolice authorities with whom they sharedthe images) were conscious that the cameradid not always produce a perfect likeness. Inother words, they understood thatphotographs, which seemed to have a strongclaim to realism and empiricaldocumentation, were just another,sometimes unreliable, form ofrepresentation. In March 1867, Patrick J.Murray, one of the directors of the Irishconvict prisons, asked the Mountjoyauthorities to supply him with a photographof a prisoner who had been discharged theprevious spring on condition that he returnto America. The prison official who dealtwith the request observed, ‘the photograph

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15 NAI, FP 185 (Gill), 264(Lawless), 337(McClelland), 487 (Toomey)

16 Here we are referring toForms K in the ‘FenianPhotographs’ collection in the National Archivesof Ireland.

17 NAI, FP 41 (Burke), 179(Gallagher), 206(Haybyrne), 504 (Waters)

Fig. 8: Patrick Fitzsimons, 22,single, national schoolteacher,Dollymount, county Dublin;arrested under the HCSA on 22December 1866, he was releasedon bail on 23 November 1867;he had a cross tattooed on theback of his left hand and a ringon the third finger of his lefthand. NAI, FP 163Fig. 9: William Grace, 25, single,labourer, remand prisoner in1866. A native of Carlow, Gracewas resident at 9 Upper KevinStreet, Dublin; he had an anchortattooed on his left arm and aring on his middle finger. NAI,FP 193

is not a striking one; it is rather full in theface’. Similarly, an official noted on the fileof William Hogan, an agent for St. Patrick’sSick Burial and Assurance Society, arrestedin the late 1860s, that his voice was ‘strongand coarse’ and that he was ‘not sogentlemanly looking as in photo’.18 In theshort term, however, the photographsimproved prison authorities’ capacity to dobackground checks on men in their custody.Photographs of sentenced Fenians, likethose of other convicted men, wereroutinely circulated to jails near theirformer residences to establish whether theyhad any previous convictions. Likewise,photographs enhanced the surveillance ofdischarged internees, making it easier forthe authorities to confirm that they werecomplying with the terms of their release.James Redmond, a ship’s porter resident at9 Bride Street, Dublin, was arrested on 20February 1866 and photographed inMountjoy before being transferred toAntrim County Jail. When he was releasedon 5 July 1866 on condition that he wentto England, the governor forwarded hisphotograph and description to theLiverpool Constabulary which had beenasked by the Home Office to visit 12Dickinson Street, the address at whichRedmond had claimed he would be living.Divisional Superintendent Benjamin Ridereported back that constables had visitedthat address and that Redmond was notknown by the occupants, a family namedMcManus, who had been there for the pasteighteen years.19

�

At the same time as warders in Mountjoystarted to photograph internees in spring1866, their Kilmainham counterparts beganphotographing Fenians in their custody. Aswell as requiring convicted men to sit forphotographs on arrival in the jail — itremained optional for remands andinternees — the Kilmainham wardersappear to have initiated the practice ofphotographing prisoners immediately prior

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Fig. 10: Edward Toomey, 26, single, storekeeper on a man-of-war in the US navy. Born in Callan,county Kilkenny, he had a woman, harp and shamrock tattooed on his right arm, two small markson his right cheek and one under his right jaw. He had recently arrived from Liverpool whenarrested in Dublin on 12 December 1866. Discharged on 3 September 1867 on condition that hewould return to America, he was allowed to return to Liverpool to work his passage to New York.NAI, FP 487

to their release. That ‘likeness’, attached toa new ‘Photograph and Description’ form,was, like the Mountjoy Form K, sent toDublin Castle.20 Initially at least, theKilmainham prisoners saw nothinguntoward in having their picture taken. In his smuggled letter, Halpin suggested thatfor some time they looked upon it as aneccentricity of Henry Price, the governor, anotoriously ugly man whom he sarcasticallydescribed as having ‘cultivated a taste forthe beautiful in early youth’. In time,however, the prisoners came to seephotography as part of the ‘happy systemadopted by our keepers to keep us properlyin the strings’. Halpin gave a sharp accountof the change in attitude among theprisoners, arguing that the photographswere intended not for the presentamusement of the governor but for futurepolice purposes:

Until lately we were given to understandthat his efforts in that line were merelyfor amusement, and under this pleamany of the prisoners were seduced tosit for their likeness. Lately, however,some obstreperous fellows refused to becaught by chaff, whereupon the amiableMr. Price, who is not supposed to be inthe affair at all, waxed exceedinglywrath and flatly told the delinquentsthat they should never leave the prisonuntil they submitted, thereby plainlyintimating that the deputy’s position wasbut a sham, and that the pictures arereally to adorn the ‘Rogues’ Gallery’ inthe Lower Castle-yard. Threats have notyet been used towards the untriedprisoners; but the tried fellows areclaimed body and soul by our beneficentrulers. So those that have submitted to

the soft saulder of the deputy, have nowthe satisfaction to learn that ProfessorsSmollen and Dawson are attentivelystudying their physiognomies with aview to future operations. This is acharming method for marking for futurepurposes all who come within thecharmed influence of Kilmainham, andmust be highly creditable to thegovernment that adopts it.21

The prisoner had identified the value of hisphotograph to the state. The Form Ks andphotographs from Mountjoy and‘Photograph and Description’ forms fromKilmainham, archived in Constabularyheadquarters, constituted the basis of themost extensive series of alphabetical filesever before compiled on Irish politicalactivists. The Constabulary’s system foraccessing these files is somewhat unclear,due in part to the removal of ‘Irish CrimeRecords’ and ‘Fenian Papers’ from Dublinto London on the eve of partition, not all ofwhich appear to have been returned. Still,surviving materials indicate that files onmany men jailed in 1866–68 were copiedinto alphabetical ledgers in the late 1860swhile others remained loosely bound.22

Certainly, however, both the ledgers andloose files were updated during the next fewyears with information sent to Dublin byboth Irish and British police forces. ArthurForrester, an eighteen-year-old Lancashire-born printer, was arrested in Dublin underthe HCSA in March 1867. The police founda revolver in his possession; Forrester wascharged and convicted with having arms ina proclaimed district and served six monthsin Kilmainham. The Constabulary updatedhis file in Dublin in 1869, noting that hehad assumed women’s clothes as a disguise

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18 NAI, FP 141 (Dunne),219 (Hogan)

19 NAI, CSORP 1866/1402620 For an example, see the

case of Henry Trodden,released from internmentin Kilmainham in July1866 on condition thathe return to England:NAI, CSORP1866/13990.

21 Irishman, 19 Oct. 1867.Price was an earlyproponent of prisonphotography. In 1864 heused photographs toidentify nineteenprisoners in Kilmainhamas recidivists; two of thesemen had thirteenprevious convictionseach. See Slattery, ‘Usesof Photography inIreland’, vol. 1, 240.Smollen was a detectivewho had tailed JamesStephens in 1865; actingdetective Dawsonparticipated in Stephens’sarrest.

22 Breandán Mac GiollaChoille, ‘FenianDocuments in the StatePaper Office’, IrishHistorical Studies, 16, 63(1969), 258–84, remainsan important guide toofficial papers on theIRB. Also see TomQuinlan, ‘The RegisteredPapers of the ChiefSecretary’s Office’, IrishArchives, (Autumn 1994),5–21.

Fig. 11: Morgan Burke, 29,single, butcher. A native ofDunmanway, county Cork, Burkehad arrived from the US aboutsix months prior to his arrestunder HCSA on 12 March 1867;he was released on 15 April 1868on condition that he return toAmerica. NAI, FP 41Fig. 12: Patrick Waters, 20,single, poulterer, remandprisoner, 1866. Resident at GreatBritain Street, he had a cut markon his left eyebrow and lefttemple, pierced ears, and a burnmark on the back of his hand.NAI, FP 504

in Manchester (Fig. 14).23 Similarly, theyupdated their description of medical studentEdmund O’Donovan in January 1870, threeyears after his release from jail, when theyreceived information from England that hehad since grown light whiskers (Fig. 15).O’Donovan, son of the celebrated scholarJohn O’Donovan, had been interned twiceunder the HCSA, first from March toSeptember 1866 and again from November1867 to May 1868; on both occasions, hehad been discharged on condition that hego to America.24 The police had goodreason to check up on these two men, bothof whom remained active revolutionaries.Forrester, a quondam ballad-writer (‘TheFelons of Our Land’ was his best-knownproduction; see page 54), and O’Donovanboth fought in the French Foreign Legionduring the Franco-Prussian War beforereturning to Britain as the IRB organizersfor, respectively, northern and southernEngland.25

Files on men no longer active in Feniancircles in Ireland or Britain were alsoreviewed in the early 1870s. The authoritiesreviewed the file on former internee John H.Gleeson of Borrisoleigh, county Tipperary,five years after his release from jail oncondition that he return to the UnitedStates. The review of Gleeson’s file in May1871 may have been related to the recentpublication of a book on the 1870 Fenianincursion into Canada; Gleeson, nowstyling himself ‘general’, had been one ofthe leaders of the ‘invasion’.26 In additionto updating existing records, theConstabulary continued to create new fileson Fenian suspects, including men basedoverseas. There was a file in Dublin onLancashire-based Michael Davitt, includinghis description and known haunts, as earlyas 1869; the Constabulary updated itseveral times prior to his arrest in 1870with information received from theirEnglish counterparts via the Home Office inLondon. Davitt’s file contained nophotograph, but both captured photographs

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Fig. 13: Thomas Gallagher, 19, single. A farmer’s son from Aughrim, county Roscommon, Gallagherwas a student of engineering when arrested under the HCSA on 27 February 1866; he was releasedon bail the following September. His Form K notes that he was a cousin of the Fenian organizerEdward Duffy. NAI, FP 179

(studio portraits provided by informers oracquired in some other way by the police)and photographs taken when the personwas in custody were also archived. Forinstance, the Irish Constabulary added aphotograph and descriptive details ofWilliam Carroll of Birkenhead to its Fenianfiles in 1870; local police had taken hisphotograph after his arrest in Liverpool forpawning a revolver.27

As the Irish republican threat to the Britishstate receded in the mid-1870s, theConstabulary had fewer occasions toconsult ‘the “rogues’ gallery” in the LowerCastle-yard,’ as Halpin had dubbed theauthorities’ photographs and descriptions ofpolitical activists. In the early 1880s,however, mass-agitation on the land issueand, in particular, the Invincibles’assassination of the Chief Secretary andUnder Secretary in May 1882 causedgovernment to radically overhaul counter-insurgency activity in Ireland. The most far-reaching development was the creation oftwo distinct sections within the RIC’sdetective system, the Ordinary Branch andthe Special Branch; the latter branch,initially conceived as an intelligence sectionconcerned with the collection of informationon secret societies and combinations thatmight countenance illegal activity, rapidlytransformed itself into a semi-secret force-within-a-force that aggregated informationon a much broader range of politicalactivists. New faces appeared in the ‘rogues’gallery’ for the first time in several years.28

The Special Branch acquired portraitphotographs of prominent political figures,including MPs, who travelled the countryon organizing or speech-making tours; thesephotographs were generally purchased fromportrait studios where they were sold aspolitical memorabilia.29 These photographswere then circulated from Dublin todivisional headquarters to facilitate theidentification, surveillance and arrest ofthese men if the need arose. Hence, portraitsof Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Davitt,

John Redmond, William Redmond and Fr.Eugene Sheehy ended up in the same files asthe photographs and descriptions of theinternees, remand prisoners and convictsphotographed in the late 1860s and early1870s; although very few of these newadditions had any involvement inFenianism, the extended collection wouldstill be known as ‘Fenian Photographs’. TheSpecial Branch also sought out group-photographs of suspects, often taken atmeetings of clubs believed to be republicanfronts. There were some surprising sourcesfor images. In 1882 a group of land activistshad their photographs taken upon theirrelease from internment in Dundalk Jailunder the Protection of Person and Property(Ireland) Act; the photographer thenmounted the portraits on a postcardadorned with shamrocks and the legend‘Dundalk Gaol, Christmas 1881’. Intendedby the sitters as a memento of their time injail or a propaganda piece, the imagelingered in the mind of senior policeofficers. In November 1886 when theConstabulary was seeking one of the men inthe photograph, the Special Branch obtaineda copy of the card from Galbraith’sphotographic studio on Clanbrassil Street,Dundalk. An official in the Special Branchoffice noted that it included ‘severalimportant men, amongst others J.Butterfield, a Northern Fenian organizer’. ‘Ithink it would be well to keep this with ourphotographs of suspects,’ he wrote to one ofhis superiors, ‘and to note on each file inwhich the suspect is referred to that suchhas been done.’30

Over the next few years, cheap portablecameras became part of regular police work,and photographs of crime scenes andcovertly snapped images of suspects beganto appear with increasing frequency inpolice files.31 From 1890, the SpecialBranch had its own photographicdepartment in the Constabulary Depot inthe Phoenix Park, where a sergeant wasemployed full-time developing and copying

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23 NAI, FP 173; ICR 13;within a few days of hisrelease, Forresterpublished a letterdetailing the threats andblandishments used bythe authorities inunsuccessful attempts toget him to turn informer,see Irishman, 12 Oct.1867.

24 O’Donovan’s brother,John, was also interned;he was a student inTrinity College. See NAI,FP 398 (Edmund); 400(John).

25 On both Forrester andO’Donovan, see T. M.Healy, Letters andLeaders of My Day, vol.1 (London, 1929),116–18; O’Donovan isalso mentioned inKatherine Tynan, Twenty-Five Years (London,1913).

26 NAI, FP 189; Anon., ABrief Account of theFenian Raids on theMissisquoi Frontier in1866 and 1870(Montreal, 1871). On Gleeson’s arrest, seeIrishman, 24 Feb. 1866. For correspondence fromthe prisoner, his wife,doctor and the US consulin Dublin, see NAI,CSORP 1866/13784.

27 NAI, FP 63 (Carroll), 119(Devitt [sic]). For a studioportrait of Davittcirculated in the 1880s,see NAI, FP 111.

28 For an excellentdiscussion, see Stephen A.Ball, ‘Policing the LandWar: Official Responsesto Political Protest andAgrarian Crime inIreland, 1879–91’(unpublished PhDdissertation, Goldsmith’sCollege, University ofLondon, 2000), 286–311.

photographs. The Dublin MetropolitanPolice established a similar department inthe same year. In late 1892, David Harrell,the commissioner of the latter force,reported to Dublin Castle that groupphotographs of suspects were hard toobtain; ‘Dublin men have avoided beingphotographed for many years past,’ hewrote of republican activists, ‘and it isimpossible to obtain copies from groups orotherwise.’32 Twenty-six years after thestate first systematically photographedsuspects in Dublin jails, Fenians were again‘refusing to sit’.

II

The experience of being photographed injail features in several Fenians’ prisonrecollections, some of which were serializedin newspapers shortly after their release,while others appeared in book-form yearslater.33 Republican icon JeremiahO’Donovan Rossa provided two highlycharged accounts of being asked to sit forphotographs, first in Mountjoy Jailfollowing his conviction for treason felonyin December 1865 and then in MillbankPrison in England in 1867, while serving hissentence. In My Years in English Jails, Rossadescribes how, upon conviction, he wasreturned to Mountjoy and photographed:

After being shaven I was led to have mypicture taken. The photographer had alarge black-painted pasteboard prepared,with my name printed across it in white,and, pinning it across my breast, he satme in position. I remained sitting andlooking according to instructions till hehad done, and he never had the mannersto tell — what artists never failed to

tell me — that I made an exceedinglygood picture.34

Rossa’s humour here throws the transitionto which he found himself subject into sharprelief. Specifically, photographing prisonersmarked a key point in the transformation ofphotography from its early association withportraiture, ‘a sign whose purpose is boththe description of an individual and theinscription of social identity’ and which isalso ‘a commodity, a luxury, an adornment,ownership of which itself confers status’.35

Rossa’s ironic comment about thephotographer’s refusal to acknowledge a‘good picture’ points to the absence ofaesthetic valuation and to the photographicsubject’s abstraction of self from thephotographic transaction. In other words, itcalls attention to the seizure of photographyby the state, a harnessing of technologywhich was previously understood as a modeof representing one’s own identity. Indeed,Rossa highlights how prison photographs —pictures which the subject does not ask tobe taken and which he will likely never see— allow the state to assert power over thebody through its documentation. AllenSekula’s depiction of photography as a‘double system’ — ‘a system ofrepresentation capable of functioning bothhonorifically and repressively’ — is usefulhere. By insisting on an understanding ofsitting for a picture as an ‘honorific’,aesthetic act, Rossa expresses his ownrecognition that, in the context of theprison, photography had become adisciplinary and repressive exercise of power.36

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29 Dublin portrait studioshad produceddaguerreotypes andlithographs of YoungIreland leaders in the late1840s but the sale ofphotographs of Irishpolitical figures firstbecame common in the1860s; for a briefdiscussion, see FintanCullen, The Irish Face:Redefining the IrishPortrait (London, 2004),203–04. Shortly after therelease of the Feniancelebrity Stephen J.Meany, The Irishmanadvertised two large-sizedportraits of Meany with a‘lithographed facsimile ofhis signature’; theadvertisement notedapprovingly that thesignature, ‘Yours mostfeloniously, Stephen J.Meany’, was‘characteristic of theman’. Ironically, aphotograph of JamesStephens found inMeany’s possession had been presented asevidence against him athis trial. See Irishman, 1 May; 8 May; 15 May1869.

30 For the Dundalkphotograph and associatedcorrespondence, see NAI, FP 3.

31 The scene of the killing ofDistrict Inspector WilliamMartin in February 1889was one of the first crimescenes extensivelydocumented by the RIC;photographers workingfor defence solicitors alsophotographed it. On theincident, see BreandánMac Suibhne, ‘Soggarth

Fig. 14: Arthur M. Forrester, 18, single, bookkeeper andletter-press printer. Born in Lanchasire, England,Forrester was living at 43 Essex Street, Dublin, whenarrested under the HCSA on 25 March 1867; a gun wasfound in his possession and he was sentenced to sixmonths for having arms in a proclaimed district. He wasdischarged on 8 October 1867. For his literaryproductions, see Ellen Forrester (his mother) and ArthurM. Forrester, Songs of the Rising Nation and otherPoems (Glasgow, 1869), reviewed in Irishman, 24 Apr.1869. NAI, FP 173

Rossa’s recollection of his encounter with aprison photographer in Millbank documentsthis historical transition in greater detail.More particularly, it emphasizes thatsurveying, possessing and representing thepotential insurgent’s body had not yet beenfully naturalized as the self-evident rights ofthe state over its subjects. The state’s claimto these rights was sufficiently unstable thatRossa could use the photographic momentto reveal its contradictions and tointerrogate its legitimacy; resistance was notonly possible, but it had the potential forsuccess. Significantly, Rossa connects beingasked to sit for a photograph in Millbankwith heightened surveillance in theaftermath of the Clerkenwell explosions of1867. After the explosions, he writes, ‘our

rescue was apprehended, and ourphotographs were wanted for the detectivesin case we were taken away’. Rossa ‘refusedto sit’; he recalls the resulting exchange withthe photographer in the following passage:

‘Come on, come on,’ said Warder Powerto me one day as he opened my door. On I went, and I was brought throughthe square to where the warders were onparade. I was soon landed in the roomwhich turned out to be the photographicdepartment of the establishment. Theartist had his glasses ready, and sat medown on a chair opposite the picturinginstrument. As soon as he had me fixedin position, and taken his hands off, he

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Aroon and GombeenPriest: Canon JamesMacFadden (1842–1917)’, in Gerard Moran,ed., Radical Irish Priests,1660–1970 (Dublin,1998), 167–69; forsamples of thephotographs, see UlsterMuseum, James GlassCollection (1889).Slattery, ‘Uses ofPhotography in Ireland’,vol. 2, 15, relates thephotographing of thescene to the establishmentof the Constabulary’sphotographic department.For the contemporaneousand more ambitious usesof photography by theFrench police underAlphonse Bertillon, seeFrizot, ‘Body ofEvidence’, 264.

32 Quoted in Slattery, ‘Usesof Photography inIreland’, vol. 2, 22. C. P.Crane, a key figure in theestablishment of thedepartment, had beeninvolved in the Martininvestigation.

33 For example, TheIrishman serialized abiography of Stephen J.Meany (by JohnAugustus O’Shea) afterhis release in summer1869; for Meany’srecollection of beingphotographed, seeIrishman, 15 May 1869.

34 Jeremiah O’DonovanRossa, Irish Rebels inEnglish Prisons: ARecord of Prison Life(New York, 1882), 73

Fig. 15: John O’Donovan, 23, single, student, Trinity College Dublin, and his brother Edmund O’Donovan (aliasEdward Hunt), 21, single, medical student. John had been in custody since November 1865 when arrested under theHCSA in April 1866; he was released in August on condition that he go to America. Edmund was resident at NelsonStreet, Dublin, when interned in March 1866; he was released in late September of that year on condition that he goto America but re-arrested under the HCSA in county Clare in November 1867; he was released in May 1868, againon condition that he go to America. O’Donovan was taken prisoner when fighting with the French Foreign Legion inthe Franco-Prussian War (his third time in custody) and, after his release, fought in the Carlist War in Spain. Hesubsequently became IRB organizer for southern England and worked as a war correspondent. He travelled toCentral Asia in 1879 where he was imprisoned by the Turks for several months and, on his release, he wrote afamous book, The Merv Oasis (London, 1882). He was killed in 1883 covering Hicks Pasha’s expedition to theSudan. NAI, FP 398, 400

made for the machine and I stood up.‘What do you stand up for?’ he said.‘What would I sit down for?’ said I.‘To take your picture.’‘My picture?’‘Yes, sit down there again,’ and he madetoward me to place me in my position.‘Now wait awhile. Who wants mypicture?’‘We want it; sit down.’ ‘You want it? Do you know I have awife?’‘What do you mean?’‘I mean I have a wife, and you havemade her awfully jealous by circulating areport that I was holding an intrigue withanother man’s wife. I don’t want to makematters worse than they are by sendingmy picture into the world; if my wife sawit with any other woman, it might causea separation for life.’‘Why, what a foolish man you are! Don’tyou know that these photographs are forthe prison authorities, and that they donot leave the prison?’‘Oh, I couldn’t rely upon that, and mymind would be uneasy. The prisonauthorities have the original, and I willgive them permission to come and lookat me whenever they please.’‘Come now, come now, don’t be sofoolish; you will only bring additionaltrouble on yourself.’ And he gently laidhands on me to coax me into the chair.‘Oh no, governor, no; there’s no troubleto me as trouble of mind, and if Iallowed you to take my picture I couldnot help thinking that it would get intothe hands of other women, and that mywife would hear it.’‘Then you absolutely refuse to allowyour picture to be taken?’‘Unless I see that it is absolutely wanted,and that I have a guarantee that it willnot be improperly used.’Here three or four of them pressed me tosit down. I sat down, and as soon as they

had their hands off me, I stood up andreplied to their persuasion thus:— ‘Seenow, governors, there is no use pressingme further. There is only one conditionon which I will allow my picture to betaken, and that is this — that the Queenwrite to me for it, and promise she willnot let it out of her own possession.’I was taken out of my cell, and the nextday I was again taken to thephotographer, with the same result asbefore … I would not give them thesatisfaction of letting them make apicture of me.37

Here, Rossa again plays on the associationof portrait photography with intimacy,romantic attachment, and the domesticsphere in order to signal the state’s intrusioninto these domains. He insists, much moreexplicitly than in his account of beingphotographed in Mountjoy, upon a priorunderstanding of photography in whichwomen were the primary consumers ofimages of men and in which the exchange ofphotographs served as a romantic andsexual transaction. This feignedmisunderstanding thus represents prisonphotography as an intrusion on the bodyand its intimacies and a materialization ofthe imperial state’s claim to possess thebody of the unruly or potentially unrulycolonial subject. Moreover, with hisintroduction of Queen Victoria to theexchange, Rossa indicates that a formerly‘private’ exchange has become an exerciseof public power and exposes the flawedlogic (from a Fenian perspective) inherent inhis conviction for treason felony, namely,the assumption that an Irish republicanowed allegiance to the British crown. Byinsisting on photography as private andpersonal rather than public, Rossasuccessfully resists both the authority of theBritish state which renders his politics illegaland treasonous and, more particularly, thefurther encroachment of state power.

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35 Tagg, Burden ofRepresentation, 37. Alsosee the account of theaesthetic and politicaleffects of the replacementof portraiture byphotography in WalterBenjamin’s essay ‘TheWork of Art in the Ageof Its TechnologicalReproducibility’ [1939],in Selected Writings, vol.4, 1938–40, ed. MichaelW. Jennings (Cambridge,Mass., 2003), 251–83.

36 Sekula, ‘The Body andthe Archive’, 345

37 Rossa, Irish Rebels inEnglish Prisons, 262–63.The allegation that Rossa(while a prisoner)endeavoured to ‘carry onan intrigue with the wifeof another prisoner’ hadbeen circulated by thegovernor of PortlandPrison; a letter he hadaddressed to ‘Mrs. MaryMoore, Denzille Street,Dublin, For Mrs.O’Donovan’ was thebasis of the accusation.See Irishman, 16 Mar.1867.

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Both of Rossa’s accounts are a reminderthat, if the photographing of Feniansmarked a major transformation in the usesof photographic technology, it alsoconstituted a key moment in British state-formation. Art historian John Tagg hasproduced a compelling history ofphotography’s ‘mobilization within theemerging apparatuses of a new and morepenetrating form of the state’ in nineteenth-century Britain.38 Tagg argues that newuses of photography reveal much about theradical restructuring of the capitalist statein this period, in particular its use ofsurveillance and disciplinary technologies asnew forms of power and knowledge over itssubjects.39 Tagg’s history of thesedevelopments focuses on clinicalphotography of the criminally insane inasylums beginning in 1856, and then theproduction of mugshots and photos ofcriminal children in the 1870s. However,the photographing of Fenian prisonerssuggests a missing link in this account ofstate photography. For notably, thedeployment of this new technology againstrepublican prisoners in Dublin prisons in1865–66 occurred contemporaneously withthe first appearance of the moderndiscourse of ‘terrorism’ to describeFenianism and the earliest articulation ofthe British state’s vision of itself as not justa counter-insurgent but as an anti-terroristapparatus. Thus, before photographybecame a pervasive method of documentingand managing criminality in Britain in the1870s, it was used systematically to collectevidence concerning those described as‘terrorists’ in the modern sense of the word.

From 1865, newspaper articles, editorialsand political cartoons, particularly inBritain but also in Ireland, began torepresent Fenians using a new language of‘terror’ which made claims about the causesand aims of insurgency.40 The word‘terrorism’ had first appeared in reactionaryaccounts and histories of the FrenchRevolution of 1789-94: Jacobin power was

‘the Reign of Terror’, the Jacobins‘terrorists’, and their system of government‘terrorism’. 41 Now, the historically specificword ‘terrorism’ was abstracted, becominga comparative term to indicate aninsurgency which had as its primarymethod the intimidation, terrorization anddestruction of those against whom it wasdirected. In this shift of usage anddefinition, ‘terrorism’ shifts from adescriptive of an institutionalized mode ofgovernance to a method of terrorizationwhich is not necessarily centralized orinstitutionalized.42 The logic of counter-revolutionary historiography, which arguedthat the Jacobin government degeneratedinto a reign of terror for terror’s sake,reached a culmination. ‘Terrorism’ wascharacterized as having no political goal, asbeing dedicated to the sole object ofcreating ‘terror’. Hence, the modern, lesshistorically specific idea of ‘terrorism’associated political violence with atavismand barbarism. The ‘terrorist’ became afigure of irrationality, alien to modern‘rational’ forms of power rather thanproduced by them.

This new discourse of ‘terrorism’crystallized immediately after theClerkenwell explosion, the event thatoccasioned Rossa’s second encounter with aprison photographer. For example, theLondon Times and many other mainstreamnewspapers repeatedly described thebombing as ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’, and‘terrorist’. They also represented it assomething novel: it was ‘a crime ofunexampled atrocity’ and ‘the worst crimein English history’. 43 Although it was clearthat the Fenians had planted the explosivesto blow a hole in the prison wall, not to killpeople, The Times wrote: ‘Their object isnow apparently to create a terrorthroughout the United Kingdom … such istheir unscrupulous ferocity’. 44 Even theliberal Newcastle Daily Chronicle declared,‘English liberalism cannot grasp a handwhich smells rank with the blood of her

38 Tagg, Burden ofRepresentation, 61

39 Tagg, Burden ofRepresentation, ch. 2–3

40 For an extended versionof this argument, see AmyE. Martin, ‘Acts of Union:Representing Nation-States and NationalIdentities in VictorianBritish and Irish Writing’(unpublished PhDdissertation, ColumbiaUniversity, 2002).

41 The Oxford EnglishDictionary documents theemergence of these termsin histories of the FrenchRevolution written asearly as 1791.

42 See the Oxford EnglishDictionary entries for‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’.

43 Times, 14 Dec.; 16 Dec.1867. Similar descriptivescan be found incontemporaneous issues of other Britishnewspapers, such as The Spectator.

44 Times, 14 Dec. 186745 Cited in Charles

Townshend, PoliticalViolence in Ireland:Government andResistance since 1848(Oxford, 1983), 65

46 For a study of therepresentation of thesimianized Irishman incartoon art, see L. P.Curtis, Apes and Angels:The Irishman inVictorian Caricature(Washington DC, rev.edn. 1997). A morerecent reading of Britishcartoons of the Feniancan be found in MichaelWillem De Nie, TheEternal Paddy: IrishIdentity and the BritishPress, 1798–1882(Madison, 2004).

47 For a later period, seeJoseph Conrad’s TheSecret Agent (1907),which presents theRussian/Irish basis for a‘terrorism’ that aims todestroy Greenwich MeanTime itself; it alsointimates the strangeaccord betweenpoliceman and terrorist.Michaelis, one of thefigures in the novel, is based on theexperiences of severalFenians, includingMichael Davitt.

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children, slaughtered in mere wantonness offanaticism’.45 Such descriptions areconsistent with the use of the term‘terrorism’ in its modern sense — as anirrational, savage, racially and culturallyatavistic programme of violence designed to kill innocent civilians, in particularwomen and children. As is apparent, thisideology quickly converged with the figureof the violent colonial ‘fanatic’ that hadbeen elaborated and disseminated inimperial gothic fiction since the earlynineteenth century.

In newspaper prose and visual images,Fenian ‘terrorism’ was most oftenrepresented as a masculine invisible threat, a monstrous presence lurking within theUnited Kingdom, an ever-present menacethat warranted continual panic on the partof potential victims. In political cartoons,the inextricable relation between this newnotion of terrorism and the transformingBritish state was most apparent. In Punchcartoons such as the exemplary ‘FenianPest’, which appeared in 1866, stateviolence and the suspension of rights andliberties in Ireland is rationalized in theinterest of protecting subjects of the crown(Fig. 16).46 Here, then, is an allegoricalstaging of one of the founding mythologiesand paradoxes of the modern state. Thecondemnation of violence legitimates stateviolence and new modes of power, butpresents this institutionalized violence asreactive and as designed to ensure theprotection of citizens. The caricaturedFenian comes to legitimize and to naturalizethe violence of the imperial state; such agesture erases the historical context of anti-colonial violence, relocating its origins inthe ontos of the Irish insurgent body andsuggesting essential (racial and cultural)rather than contingent origins for Fenianpolitics.47

The racialism of newspaper narratives andcartoon art can also be read as a part of adrive to establish the visibility of the

Fenian, integral to any successful strategy ofcounter-insurgency. Without skin colour asthe basis of racial identification, thepossibility that Fenians could blend into anEnglish crowd pointed up the failure ofboth racial classification and of policingstructures. This failure was more profoundbecause the IRB was a highly organizedsecret society with a cell structure that hadpenetrated even the ranks of the BritishArmy. British authorities found it difficultto identify Fenians in any definitive way;those who were identified were oftendifficult to convict due to lack of admissibleevidence, hence the ‘necessity’ of suspendinghabeas corpus in Ireland and interningsuspects indefinitely. Texts which saturatedthe public sphere in the United Kingdomdisseminated a racialized construction ofIrish ‘terrorism’ which might work againstsuch failures and against Fenian strategiesof insurgency. In cartoons such as ‘TheFenian Pest’, the simianized and racializedbody of the Fenian is reassuring to theextent that it makes him hyper-visible toBritish citizens and the state.

The tension in this developing moderndiscourse of ‘terrorism’ — its representationas a threat that is simultaneouslyfrighteningly invisible and yet visible to thepoint of caricature — finds its counterpart inthe material history of the photographing of

Fig. 16: ‘The Fenian Pest’,from Punch, London, 3March 1866. Hibernia: ‘O my dear Sister, whatARE we to do with thesetroublesome people?’;Britannia: ‘Try isolationfirst, my dear, and then —’

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Fenians. British popular culture disseminatedan ideology of the menacing yet grotesqueand easily-captured Fenian, enacting aparadoxical gesture of inciting viewers’ fearyet reassuring the public of the state’sefficacy in ‘stamping out’ the threat. Inmaterial practice, the British statetransformed its modes of power in responseto the Fenian movement. David Lloyd arguesthat ‘what appears in statist narrative as pre-modern, atavistic and generally violentelements of colonial society are in factreciprocally engaged in the emergence of themodern apparatus of the colonial state’.48

Fenianism participated in such atransformation through its critical position inthe development of the tactics, apparatusesand ideology of counter-insurgency thatbecame defining features of the modernBritish state. The innovative use ofphotography to establish the visibility ofboth interned and released Fenians is aprimary and telling example of thistransformation. Such prison photographyexemplifies the state’s claims to assert powerover bodies and the way that it extendedsuch claims even beyond the nation-state’sformal boundaries. For example, theexchange of photographs between Britainand Ireland, technically different policejurisdictions although both parts of the‘United Kingdom’, suggests as much, as doesthe problems posed for authorities by Irish-American internees.49 Thus, photographingFenians was part of a mid-nineteenth-centuryconsolidation and expansion of state powerthrough the suspension of the rights ofcitizens, residents and foreign travellers atwill as well as the use of new forms ofsurveillance as deemed necessary in theinterest of ‘public safety’. These images areproducts of a state that had begun to defineitself in relation to politics and practices thatit called ‘terrorism’ and, specifically, to apopulation of detainees suspected ofproducing or even simply supporting ‘terror’.

Significantly, these developments coincidedwith the extension of the franchise to more

working-class males in the Reform Acts of1867 and 1868. That extension was itselfassociated with a change in the languageand meaning of citizenship as ‘docility orrespectability’ replaced ownership as thecondition for voting; thus, assent to thestate’s authority and obedience before thelaw became the condition for fullcitizenship.50 The enfranchised subject hadto disavow all forms of anarchy, includingthe Reform agitation that produced thisextension of suffrage, or his rights ofcitizenship would be revoked. KeithMcClelland has argued that ‘the axial figurewithin the controversies of 1866–67 aboutwho was to be enfranchised was the“respectable working man”’.51 This idealof ‘manhood’ emphasized the moral role ofthe respectable working-class male subjectas a law-abiding citizen who performed his‘proper’ social function as father, economichead of the household, and protector ofwomen and children.52 The new ideologyof citizenship reproduced the logic of thestate — the duty to protect weaker subjectsfrom threat — through a particular ideal ofmasculinity.

Located in this context, the representationof Fenians in cartoons stands as theantithesis of ‘the respectable working-classman’, the figure at the centre of debatesabout the extension of suffrage. Incaricature, the Fenian is the inversion andnegation of British national identity and itsnewest articulation, obedient malecitizenship. This juxtaposition is expressedmost often through gendered narratives inwhich the Fenian is a man who destroyswomen and children rather than protectingthem. In other words, the Irish Fenian is theracial and cultural converse of the ethicalcitizen subject. He exists as a terrifyingphantasmatic counterpoint to the newlydefined ethically masculine working-classcitizen.53 Thus, at the very moment whenthe state seems to extend rights to moresubjects, it consolidates and expands itspower by justifying the suspension of those

48 David Lloyd, ‘RegardingIreland’, in Ireland afterHistory (Cork, 1999),45–46

49 Times, 11 Dec. 1867,carried an article by‘Historicus’, calling foran international code ofcitizenship in order toremedy the particularproblems raised byFenianism and morespecifically to allow theBritish state jurisdictionover Irish-AmericanFenians. For a briefdiscussion of this article,see Catherine Hall, KeithMcClelland, and JaneRendall, ‘Introduction’,in Defining the VictorianNation, 57.

50 David Lloyd and PaulThomas, Culture and the State (New York, 1998), 136

51 Keith McClelland,‘England’s Greatness, theWorking Man’, in Hall etal., Defining the VictorianNation, 76–77

52 McClelland, ‘England’sGreatness’, 98–99

rights in the case of anyone who does notrecognize the legitimacy of its authority. Thecaricatured Fenian serves as the limit of thestate’s frontier of citizenship and as therationalization of its monopoly on violence.However, the photographed Fenians are acritical visual supplement to this discourse,that demonstrate exactly what was at stakein such rationalization — the expansion andretrenchment of the state’s capacity toproduce obedient subjects.54

III

I can discover no evidences of ‘villainy’ inthe panorama of faces now before me. Itappears that the originals are allconspirators — Fenians, or something ofthat kind. I look at portrait after portrait,and I say — ‘There is a man to whom Iwould trust myself, were I travelling on adark night through an uninhabitedcountry, with ten thousand pounds ingold under my charge.’ Yet these men areinmates of English prisons, ‘felons’,‘criminals’, ‘traitors’ and at home thereare gentlewomen who have lain in theirbosoms, and who (like me) refuse tobelieve this. But then the explanation liesbehind: these men, kindly, amiable, good,who in good order of things, wouldmake a high and honourable reputation,find themselves branded as traitors, andare herded with England’s most foul andbrutal scoundrels because they believedtheir country was cruelly wronged, andthey thought to remove that wrong byphysical force.

D[enis] H[olland], ‘A Gallery of IrishFaces. A Study of the Portraits in The Irishman’, in The Irishman,

7 April 1866

In spring 1866, journalist Denis Hollandwrote a series of articles on engravedportraits of well-known Fenians, which hadappeared in the republican press. The serieschallenged the discourse of ‘terrorism’ thatrationalized both the physiognomical

caricatures of Irish ‘terrorists’ then commonin British newspapers and thephotographing of Fenian suspects, whichwas, at that moment, being institutionalizedin Dublin prisons. By emphasizing both theordinariness and respectability of the menand women depicted in the engravings,Holland contested the idea that ‘terrorists’are the antithesis of average citizens and, byincluding women, that they are all deviantmales. The most remarkable feature of the‘panorama of faces’ in the paper was thatthey could not be easily differentiated fromthe faces of other ‘good’ men, even from thewriter himself; their humanity was proof ofthe rationality of their actions. In thepassage quoted above, he invites his reader’sidentification with the men depicted in theportraits, inserting them into a recognizablenarrative of masculinity, desire and family,while at the same time elevating them asnational heroes; the noble-minded,politically motivated Fenians stand incontrast to ‘England’s most foul and brutal scoundrels’.55

A recognition that the state misrepresentsaverage, respectable individuals as deviantin order to justify extraordinary repressivemeasures — internment and lengthysentences for men convicted of treason —underpins Holland’s series; likewise, there isan implicit warning that the state legitimatesthe expansion of its coercive capacity —including intrusions on the body — as anexception but that it rarely relinquishespowers claimed in exceptionalcircumstances. Certainly, the British statedeployed visual technology against an ever-widening range of Irish people in the latterhalf of the nineteenth century. First,convicts, then men on remand for Fenian-related charges (Fig. 17), and then suspects(internees) were photographed in Dublinjails.56 By the mid-1880s the state wasarchiving photographs not only of prisoners(convicts, remands, and internees) but alsoportraits and surreptitiously snappedphotographs of political activists (often with

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53 John Newsinger,Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain(London, 1994), 25

54 Sarah Jane Edge,‘Photographic Historyand the VisualAppearance of an IrishNationalist Discourse1840–1870’, VictorianLiterature and Culture,32, 1 (2004), 35, arguesthat prison photographsof Fenians ‘may haveplayed a role in theformation of a sharedidentity of Irishness’ andthat ‘they need to be seenas part of a morewidespread institutionaldiscourse on criminality,class, and racial/ethnicdifference’. However, asEdge acknowledges, thephotographs were notcirculated to a wideaudience, and they weretaken because of theauthorities’ fear that theIrish ‘difference’ thatproduced Fenianismmight not be recognizablyexpressed on the body.Lacking an audience, thephotographs, therefore,are less an expression ofracializing discourseconcerning Irishness andmore a counterpart to it.

55 Although Holland’sreading of the portraitschallenges Britishdiscourses concerningIrish masculinity, herelies on traditionalgendered narratives thatrepresent the Irishnationalist hero as maleand as the protector ofwomen. This problematicof the masculine runsthroughout the writingsof the Fenians, andpoints to the difficultiesof countering thecolonial state’s narrativeswhile retaining thevisions of gender, raceand nation that arecentral to them.

friends with no political involvement) andeven members of parliament. Thesuspension of rights and harnessing oftechnology in unusual circumstances hadserved as the foundation for thenormalization of new apparatuses of powerand knowledge to which all, rather than afew, were now potentially subject.57

The contemporary relevance of such ananalysis is clear. The attacks of 9/11 and thewars and occupations that have followed inAfghanistan and in Iraq have broughtseemingly disparate elements to the centreof a debate about the modern state’sconfrontation with insurgency and, moreparticularly, with ‘terrorism’. Thiscontroversy raises questions about thesuspension of civil liberties (particularlyhabeas corpus); the deployment of newtechnologies in the intensifieddocumentation and surveillance of citizensand foreigners; the status and treatment ofpolitical prisoners and prisoners of war; andthe physical limits of a state’s power —specifically, whether its power ends at itsborder or may extend beyond it. One of theprimary ways that these problems haveliterally and theoretically been brought intoview is through the medium of photography,in large part due to the widespreaddissemination of photographs of Iraqidetainees being tortured in Abu Ghraib. Thelate Susan Sontag, for example, argued thatthe central place of photography within thecurrent crisis is a peculiarly contemporaryphenomenon, one that is linked to thetransformation of experience by theproliferation of visual culture in the latecapitalist global economy of the twentiethand early twenty-first centuries.58 But whatseems to be peculiarly contemporary is notnew. The ‘rogues’ gallery’ compiled inIreland in the mid-1860s is a reminder thatphotography was a foundational element inthe ‘war on terror’ at its inception over acentury ago.

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56 At the same time, theIrish experience becamea model for theinstitutionalization of themandatory mugshot inthe British penal systemin the 1870s, see Slattery,‘Uses of Photography inIreland’, vol. 2, 228–32,242–43.

57 These issues are nowmodified by theconversion ofKilmainham into amuseum in which thetechnology ofsurveillance is itselfsubjected to a lateranalysis in which thetechnology is furtherhistoricized. See ÁineO’Brien, ‘Marketing andManaging ColonialSpectacle: In the Belly ofthe Archive’, in JohnPaul Waters, ed., SouthAtlantic Quarterly, 95, 1(Winter 1996), 103–44.

58 Susan Sontag, ‘ThePhotographs Are Us:Regarding the Torture ofOthers’, in The NewYork Times Magazine,23 May 2004, 27

Fig. 17: Joseph Fortune, 18, single, labourer, Bride’s Alley,Dublin, remand prisoner in 1866. NAI, FP 174