Alen MacWeeney / White Horse, County Donegal, 1965
Photo Museum Ireland presents Alen MacWeeney: ANTHOLOGY, the landmark retrospective exhibition, and stunning new monograph by one of Ireland’s most significant photographers.
This new exhibition and book bring together a body of work that moves from Dublin to London, Paris and New York, and across street photography, portraiture, Irish social history, international cultural life, landscape and still life. Across some seventy years, Alen MacWeeney has crafted a body of work distinguished by its poetic intensity, masterful composition, and deep human connection.
Moving between documentary record and poetic encounter, photographing artists and communities, and changing cities and rural landscapes, MacWeeney’s lens has captured the world with a unique and enduring vision. This career-spanning exhibition showcases over 150 iconic and rarely seen works, offering the most complete view of the artist’s photographic practice to date.
Alen MacWeeney / Halloween Boy, Ardoyne, Belfast, Time-Life, Inc, 1971 © Alen MacWeeney
Alen MacWeeney / Joe Donaghue and Olivine, Travellers, Cherry Orchard, Dublin, 1965
From MacWeeney’s early Dublin street photographs, his 1960s work with Irish Traveller communities, the New York years, including his acclaimed 1970s New York Subway series, through to his more recent work, ANTHOLOGY brings together some of the most culturally resonant strands of his career. The exhibition also includes work connected to Northern Ireland, the Bloomsbury Group, the Irish landscape and later still lifes, revealing the breadth of a practice that moves between social record, portraiture, popular culture, memory and poetic observation. Drawn from MacWeeney’s extensive archive, the exhibition includes black-and-white silver gelatin prints, colour work and rarely seen material that trace the evolution of his photographic language across seven decades. The project also reflects the wider significance of MacWeeney’s archive, which was acquired by University College Cork’s Boole Library in 2019.
Alen MacWeeney / Traveller Girl with Cellophane, Cherry Orchard, Dublin, 1965 © Alen MacWeeney
Alen MacWeeney / Coffee Shop, Detroit, The Saturday Evening Post, 1968 © Alen MacWeeney
ANTHOLOGY Monograph
Discover the definitive collection of one of the world’s most compelling photographers.
Alen MacWeeney: Anthology is the first comprehensive retrospective, spanning seventy years of the acclaimed Irish photographer’s extraordinary career. From his beginnings as a teenage press photographer in Dublin, to his apprenticeship with the legendary Richard Avedon in New York and Paris, MacWeeney swiftly abandoned the studio to develop a signature style of composed, yet gritty, street photography.
This volume showcases the vast and deeply human scope of his work, distinguished by a painterly eye that reveals the profound character of its subjects. At the heart of the collection is MacWeeney’s celebrated and compassionate documentation of the Irish Travellers, a crucial cultural record, capturing a vanishing way of life. The book features iconic works, including his poignant photographs of the conflict in Northern Ireland, intimate portrayals of family members of the Bloomsbury Group, and the melancholy street portraits of his 1970s’ New York Subway series.
MacWeeney’s masterful control of light and composition – from rich colours to a vast range of gorgeous greys – lends a thoughtful, quiet repose to his images, giving the sense that the subject has only just left the room.
With over 300 pages of stunning reproductions, this essential book solidifies MacWeeney’s place among the masters of modern photography. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His archive was acquired by University College Cork Library in 2019. For collectors, photography enthusiasts, and lovers of Irish history, Anthology is a timeless and powerful testament to a life spent behind the lens.
About the Curator
Niall Sweeney is an artist, designer, film and theatre maker. In 2000, he founded the multi-award-winning creative studio Pony Ltd., London, together with electronic musician Nigel Truswell, where they continue to make work internationally in art, design, photography, print, theatre, film, performance, installation, music, publishing and writing. Over the years, the studio has designed and produced many significant and award-winning publications for and about artists, photographers and filmmakers, including Derek Jarman, Masahisa Fukase, Hurvin Anderson, McDermott & McGough, Isaac Julien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Joyce Pensato, Leonora Carrington, Nik Roche, Grayson Perry and Philip Jones Griffiths. They worked closely with renowned photographer Chris Killip for a number of years, with whom they would go on to produce numerous publications, including The Station, The Last Ships, Portraits and Skinningrove, and then the definitive, full-career retrospective of Killip’s life and work, Chris Killip: 1946-2020. Niall has been collaborating with acclaimed photographer Eamonn Doyle for over three decades on music, books, exhibitions and films, with recent work together taking them across Ireland, Spain and Japan.
Alen MacWeeney: ANTHOLOGY
December 5, 2026 – February 7, 2027 / Photo Museum Ireland
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