Father and Son at a Hurling Match, Father Murphy Memorial Park, Newmarket-on-Fergus, Ireland

From the Getty Museum record

> In 1954 Dorothea Lange traveled to Ireland with her son Daniel Dixon to make photographs for an article that was published the following year in *Life* as "Irish Country People." The trip and article were prompted by her close reading of a 1937 book by the Harvard anthropologist Conrad M. Arensberg, who collected six lectures under the title *The Irish Countryman*. Arensberg, who based his findings on time spent in the village of Luogh in County Clare, introduces the volume with the chapter "The Interpretation of Custom," which discusses the recent shift in anthropological research from the "history of forms and institutions to a study of behavior." His first pages contain a defense of social anthropology and its practice in the field, specifically in Ireland, which was then attracting archaeologists, ethnographers, and folklorists from the United States. > > The *Life* article, which featured twenty of Lange's images, included another view of this man's back and large, rough hands. Instead of just a single small hand clasping the bigger one on the right, however, the published picture shows two hands clasping the man's. The caption suggests that these hands, "linked almost in symbol of the close family relationship of the country Irish," are those of two boys in the company of their grandfather as they observe a horse show. *Dorothea Lange's Ireland,* published in 1996, presents a photograph of the same back and the face of the child on the right (in fact a girl) with a caption identifying the two figures as a father and child at a hurling game. Although confusion about the precise familial relationship exists, the present plate does not lose its significance as a reflection of the human bonds, as well as the aesthetic qualities, that Lange found while in the northwest farm country of County Clare. Her *After Church, Toquerville, Utah* ([2000.50.31](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/128377)), from the year before, is another example of her urge to capture the universal forms of human affection. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 70. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.