Endlicher's vintage photos capture Ireland before vanishing

Rare photographs of Ireland from 1963 show a world about to disappear, a country before it took its first steps toward modernity.

- Ciarn Fahey, The Independent

Roland Reagan

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 stonewalled 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.