BERLIN (AP) — Rare photographs of Ireland from 1963 show a world about to disappear, a country before it took its first steps toward modernity.
Black and white images captured by a young German photographer, Diether Endlicher — who later spent four decades covering the Olympics and major global events for The Associated Press — are being shown at the Irish embassy in Berlin, where Endlicher, now 85, was honored last weekend for his role in documenting moments of Irish life from another era.
The photos feature boatmen, fishermen, workmen, herders taking their animals to markets, women transporting milk by donkey cart, a funeral, devout worshippers praying to relics in stone-walled fields, ruined abbeys, dramatic landscapes, children looking at TVs through a shop window, an evocation of a time before modern conveniences arrived to convert all.
The pictures lay unseen and forgotten in Endlicher’s attic until recently, when he rediscovered them after deciding to go through his archive. He scanned the now 62-year-old negatives and contacted the embassy to see if there was any interest. There was.
Maeve Collins, the Irish ambassador to Germany, praised the photographs’ “beautiful detail” and historical importance.
“They bring a vivid expression to the lived experience of people on the west coast of Ireland in the early 1960s,” she said.
Photos are record of a road trip
Endlicher was 22 when he traveled with a friend from Germany to the west coast of Ireland in a tiny Fiat 500, a two-door bubble car known as the “Bambino” that was not designed for road trips. He carried a Leica M2 and three lenses to places where few had seen cameras before.
Once they got to Ireland’s west coast, they found a man transporting turf to Inishmaan, one of the Aran Islands in Galway Bay, in a large sailing vessel with no motor. They decided to go with him and Endlicher took photos as they went.
“I thought we’d never arrive there because the wind was not so strong. The boat traveled very slow,” Endlicher told the AP. “It was an interesting trip there and then when we landed on Inishmaan, that was a different world.”
He saw fishermen at work, and peasants threshing barley by beating stalks on stones. Their clothes were 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 want their photos taken. The Aran Islands are still part of the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking area, and on Inishmaan at the time, most did not speak any English.
“Inishmaan was a different world, even from the mainland,” Endlicher said. “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 cover U.S. President Roland Reagan’s visit for the AP. He worked for the news agency 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,” said Endlicher, who would ski the slopes before big races to find the best positions for photos.
Endlicher was at the 1972 Olympics in Munich where 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed after being targeted by the Palestinian group Black September.
He traveled to Israel for news assignments in the 1980s and 90s and did several stints in Gaza, where he saw the first intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
He remembers Israeli soldiers forcing him to hand over his film after he took photos of them beating a child who had been running with a Palestinian flag in Khan Younis, in Gaza.
“I had no chance, I had to give them the film,” he said.
Endlicher covered the changes unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, as well as 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 said. “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 also embedded with American troops during 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 films out to be processed and transmitted.
“He must have had some deal with the border police or the Russian army,” he said.
Job presents dangers
Reflecting on the dangers he faced over a 42-year career with the AP — Endlicher also previously worked for German news agency DPA – he said he believes there is a necessity to take pictures, to bear witness.
“It’s necessary that some people are willing to take the risk. Like Anja Niedringhaus, she paid with her life,” he said 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 they were joined by his wife, Andrea, at the ambassador’s residence for dinner that evening.
“I’m very happy that they saw the value of these pictures,” he said.