Colourful tales from Clare folk

Mary Rose Crowe (4) holding her father's hand in County Clare, 1954.

Colour drenches Dierdre Lynch's small documentary film set on the west coast of Ireland, south of the fabled Galway Bay. The generous green of the countryside, the bibulously red complexions of the men whose English is so specific as to require subtitles; the ochre yellow of the paint brush-slapped, generation after generation, on the roughly plastered interior walls of the houses she takes us into.

But in essence, Photos To Send is a film about a monochrome world, a homage to one of the 20th century's truly great photographers whose medium was black-and-white film.

In 1954 the American photographer Dorothea Lange travelled to County Clare on an assignment for Life magazine. Using only what Dennis Wylde, a local photographer who assisted her, describes as "God's light," she took more than 2400 photographs, creating a record of the rural life she found.

The resulting photo essay, "Irish Country People", was only one of many standout achievements in a distinguished career. But it was the one that caught the eye of Lynch.

A sixth-generation American of Irish extraction, the film-maker had never paid much attention to her roots until her imagination was fired by the Leon Uris historical novel, Trinity.

"I read it at college and loved every second of it," says Lynch, speaking from her home in New Hampshire. "I read it on one summer weekend and three weeks later I was in Ireland. I had saved all my money for a trip to Europe and I blew it all."

The trip fired her imagination and her curiosity about her Irish ancestry which had never been a large part of her upbringing.

Lange's photos gave her the inspiration to take it further and the result is a warm and tender film in which she retraces the steps of the great photographer, more than 40 years later, and tracks down some of the subjects of the famous shots. Yet the film is more than simply an exercise in artistic nostalgia. As she talks to the adults that Lange's children became, Lynch winkles out the stories that lie behind the evocative but sometimes ambiguous portraits, drawing a ringingly authentic picture of hard and sometimes sad lives.

It is a tribute to the film-maker that the interviewees open up so easily, although she recalls that she did encounter some suspicion.

"The key thing I had to remember was that I was always an outsider," she says. "I was a Yank coming into a small area and talking to people about their lives. There were some people who did say no and the first time that happened it was a big shock. But when you see how open they are, a lot of that is just in the nature of the Irish. They are extremely generous and gregarious and curious.

"People used to ask whether I had family in Clare and I started out saying I didn't and their faces just dropped and I realised that was the wrong answer. By the end of the trip, I was saying, 'Maybe. You never know' and that made all the difference."

Mostly Lange arrived unannounced at the houses of people whose addresses, carefully recorded in Lange's field notes, had not changed in the intervening decades.

"Mostly I did the interviews alone, just me and the camera," she says. "It suited the small spaces and it was more intimate. Most of them came to understand that I wasn't coming in with any kind of spin. I just wanted to know about their lives.

"But also I liked these people and I wanted to do right by them. It was important to me that the film strike the right note."

Photos To Send is generously laced with Lange's original images and, as Lynch lingers on the striking portraits, we feel a powerful sense of the esteem, even awe, in which she holds the photographer, who died in 1965.

"I started out in still photography in college before I got into television," she says, "and if you are in photography you know her work. Any American history book has at least one of her photographs, usually one of the series she shot in the Dustbowl during the Great Depression. I was going through some stuff the other day and I found my photography 101 notebook; the second thing I wrote in it was the name 'Dorothea Lange'.

"Her photographs are so sympathetic and yet so powerful. They are so dead-on straight and you can't turn away from those photographs.

"I was intimidated at first because I was working with one of the greatest photographers of all time and you want to honour that work. You know too, because of Dorothea's place in history, that that work is going to be examined and you want to do it right." 

ON SCREEN

*What: Photos To Send, documentary by film-maker Dierdre Lynch

*Where and when: Academy Cinema, from today