Comiskey’s protest photos document how the Irish went to the streets to fight for women’s and minorities rights.
Orla Fitzpatrick
Orla Fitzpatrick is a librarian and photographic historian from Dublin, Ireland. She holds a PhD on the topic of the Irish photographic book, modernity and modernism, 1922-1949, from Ulster University (2016). She teaches photographic history at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and is the Head Librarian at the National Museum of Ireland. Recent publications include an entry on the nineteenth Irish photographer, Augusta Crofton Dillon, in Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes edited by Luce Lebart and Marie Robert (Paris, Les Éditions Textual, 2020) and a chapter in Contact Zones: Photography, Migration, and Cultural Encounters in the U.S. (Leuven University Press/Cornell University Press, 2021) on a migrant Irish woman’s snapshot album. She presented a conference paper entitled ‘Turning the Tide: photographs of protest from the archive of Rose Comiskey, 1982 to 1992’ at Fast Forward: How Women Work at the Tate Modern, London, in November 2019. She is a receipient of the 2021 Peter E. Palmquist memorial research for grant women in photography.
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey