Customer Reviews

People of the Road: The Irish Travellers (Irish Studies)

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It's difficult to review a photographic collection, but the introductory essay, all too briefly, sets up the three decades over which Oppersdorf, an American photojournalist, tracked on camera various Irish traveller families. He was lucky to be able to record their last days on the road, as since the 1970s-mid 90s here documented, many travellers have settled into more permanent dwellings. These photos show many careworn faces, women at early ages looking much older under the burden of many children, men equally weary of a hard existence in the often unforgiving Irish climate, and children gazing at the lens with mingled suspicion and interest.

In his sensitive introduction, that could and should have been far more in-depth, given what Oppersdorff's capable of telling us, the photographer indicates how wary his subjects were of his presence. I believe this would've merited much more detail, and the sparse presentation of this book--63 plates and maybe 3000 words of text at best, only begins to whet one's curiousity.

These are good pictures, mostly from the early 1970's, with some more recent pictures. There is little commentary and the pictures do not amount to a photoessay, however. I suspect the author just happened to have some random, but high quality, traveller photos in his career collection which he (correctly) assumed would be publishable. The only reasons to get this book are that 1) he is an excellent photographer, and 2) so few journalists have paid any attention to this fascinating subculture.