Rare 1963 pictures reveal Ireland’s previous by Diether Endlicher’s lens

BERLIN (AP) — Rare pictures of Ireland from 1963 present a world about to vanish, a rustic earlier than it took its first steps towards modernity.

Black and white photos captured by a younger German photographer, Diether Endlicher — who later spent 4 a long time protecting the Olympics and main world occasions for The Associated Press — are being proven on the Irish embassy in Berlin, the place Endlicher, now 85, was honored final weekend for his function in documenting moments of Irish life from one other period.

The photographs function boatmen, fishermen, workmen, herders taking their animals to markets, ladies transporting milk by donkey cart, a funeral, religious worshippers praying to relics in stone-walled fields, ruined abbeys, dramatic landscapes, kids taking a look at TVs by a store window, an evocation of a time earlier than trendy conveniences arrived to transform all.

The photos lay unseen and forgotten in Endlicher’s attic till not too long ago, when he rediscovered them after deciding to undergo his archive. He scanned the now 62-year-old negatives and contacted the embassy to see if there was any curiosity. There was.

Maeve Collins, the Irish ambassador to Germany, praised the images’ “beautiful detail” and historic significance.

“They bring a vivid expression to the lived experience of people on the west coast of Ireland in the early 1960s,” she mentioned.

Photos are file of a street journey

Endlicher was 22 when he traveled with a good friend from Germany to the west coast of Ireland in a tiny Fiat 500, a two-door bubble automobile often known as the “Bambino” that was not designed for street journeys. He carried a Leica M2 and three lenses to locations the place few had seen cameras earlier than.

Once they bought to Ireland’s west coast, they discovered a person transporting turf to Inishmaan, one of many Aran Islands in Galway Bay, in a big crusing vessel with no motor. They determined to go along with him and Endlicher took photographs as they went.

“I thought we’d never arrive there because the wind was not so strong. The boat traveled very slow,” Endlicher advised the AP. “It was an interesting trip there and then when we landed on Inishmaan, that was a different world.”

He noticed fishermen at work, and peasants threshing barley by beating stalks on stones. Their garments have been home-spun from tweed. Electricity hadn’t reached the island. Turf from the mainland was used for heating and cooking.

Many of the locals made clear they didn’t need their photographs taken. The Aran Islands are nonetheless a part of the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking space, and on Inishmaan on the time, most didn’t converse any English.

“Inishmaan was a different world, even from the mainland,” Endlicher mentioned. “Europe was very different then and so the difference between Ireland and Europe, mainland European countries was not so big. The agriculture was about the same. Farmers worked with horses. The only thing that was different in Ireland was donkeys. There were many donkeys at the time.”

Return to work for the AP

Endlicher returned to Ireland in 1984 to cowl U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s go to for the AP. He labored for the information company from 1965 to 2007.

“I covered 29 Olympics altogether, Winter and Summer Olympics. I covered many Winter Olympics. As a Bavarian, I almost grew up on skis,” mentioned Endlicher, who would ski the slopes earlier than huge races to seek out the very best positions for photographs.

Endlicher was on the 1972 Olympics in Munich the place 11 Israeli athletes and coaches have been killed after being focused by the Palestinian group Black September.

He traveled to Israel for information assignments within the Nineteen Eighties and 90s and did a number of stints in Gaza, the place he noticed the primary intifada, a Palestinian rebellion towards Israel’s navy occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

He remembers Israeli troopers forcing him at hand over his movie after he took photographs of them beating a baby who had been working with a Palestinian flag in Khan Younis, in Gaza.

“I had no chance, I had to give them the film,” he mentioned.

Endlicher coated the modifications unleashed by the autumn of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, in addition to uprisings in Georgia and Armenia.

“I remember in Moscow, there was this uprising when the communists tried to occupy the parliament, that was after (former Russian President Boris) Yeltsin, there were a lot of shootings in Moscow,” he mentioned. “I was undercover, under a truck, and next to me was a TV cameraman in a telephone cell, and they shot at the telephone cell and he was wounded.”

Endlicher was additionally embedded with American troops throughout the Gulf War in 1991, and had been in Prague, Czechoslovakia for the Soviet invasion in 1968, when he relied on a taxi driver driving to and from Vienna, Austria to get his movies out to be processed and transmitted.

“He must have had some deal with the border police or the Russian army,” he mentioned.

Job presents risks

Reflecting on the hazards he confronted over a 42-year profession with the AP — Endlicher additionally beforehand labored for German information company DPA – he mentioned he believes there’s a necessity to take photos, to bear witness.

“It’s necessary that some people are willing to take the risk. Like Anja Niedringhaus, she paid with her life,” he mentioned of his former AP colleague who was killed in Afghanistan in 2014. “The thing is you have to be independent, I think. If you’re married and have kids, it’s a different story. If you are single and have no obligations … It’s also difficult to keep up friendships. I had also a time when the job was the most important thing to me. And I neglected some of my family life. It’s a conflict.”

Endlicher’s son, Matthias, accompanied him to the embassy’s tribute on Saturday, and so they have been joined by his spouse, Andrea, on the ambassador’s residence for dinner that night.

“I’m very happy that they saw the value of these pictures,” he mentioned.