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WITH MARTIAL LAW in place during the Easter Rising, taking photographs would have been enough to get you arrested.
It is with that in mind that a new photographic exhibition of the Rebellion running for most of this year should be celebrated.
‘Rising’ at the National Library of Ireland (NLI) on Kildare Street in Dublin features some of the most important moments of the Rising as well as an illustration of the destruction that followed.
“When we selected the content for the exhibition, we were keen to address certain questions,” explains curator Sara Smyth.
How did Dublin look during Easter Week 1916, as fighting raged and buildings fell? What kind of landscape, physical and political, was left after the surrender?
In total there are 60 images as part of the collection with a number of them in large scale as part of an attempt to convey the Rising’s impact on Dublin City Centre.
Other photographs in the exhibition include members of the public discovering the Proclamation on Easter Monday and lines of Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army soldiers in the GPO.
The exhibition is part of NLI’s 1916 commemorations which also has 70,000 images available online.
An exhibition which focuses on the leaders themselves called ‘Signatories’ is also running parallel to the photographic archive and runs until the end of the year.
It’s also planned that the personal papers and photographs of the seven signatories of the proclamation will be put online.
The exhibition is augmented by other audio recordings from letters and diaries that detail first-hand accounts of the Rising.
The NLI’s ‘Rising’ exhibition is open seven days a week until 5pm and is free to enter. It runs until October.
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