This March, Kinvara Heritage Group is delighted to present 'Cresswell Comes Home', an exhibition at Kinvara Courthouse showcasing photographs of local Kinvara people, daily life, and landscapes captured by Robert Cresswell in the 1950s. Official opening will be on Friday, March 14 at 7pm and the photos will be exhibited until March 23.
Cresswell, a Paris-based American anthropologist, lived in Kinvara between 1955 and 1956, during which time he took over 400 photographs documenting the area. He later gifted the copyright of these images to the Kinvara Community Council for educational and heritage purposes. A selection of his photographs were featured in the 2019 Ireland in Focus exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland.
In 2024, the framed images from that exhibition were kindly donated to Kinvara by the National Museum, allowing them now to be displayed locally for the first time - hence the exhibition’s title, 'Cresswell Comes Home'. Cresswell’s research in Kinvara culminated in his seminal work, Une communauté rurale de l'Irlande (A Rural Community in Ireland ), published by the Institut d'Ethnologie in Paris in 1969.
The Courthouse in Kinvara is open daily from 11am to 5pm.
